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Tagclouds and cultural changes

In the previous post I discussed how we can measure the relative importance of tags in a post, by calculating their weight, as

  • weight of tag t= (number of people using t)/(total number of people)

I also said that:

Not only we could study a culture by studying the differences in the power law approximated by the tag clouds used by people of that culture. But we could even measure cultural eartquake by measuring the difference between the tag cloud being generated before a certain event, or after a certain event.

Independently Clay Shirky was coming at a similar conclusion, although he more focused on temporal changes that seem more signature of a particular subgroup of people all bookmarking a site at a certain time:

During a period of about 120 users’ additions of OIO, 20 or of them used the tag ‘ia’, putting it between #7 and #10 during that period. Now it is down to #17. This suggests that one or a few IA-oriented sites or mailing lists posted the link, and it got a flurry of attention from those taggers in a narrower window of time. This in turn suggests a conversationally tightly-knit IA community.

Through this tool we can see changes in the culture we are living in. We are used to feel those changes, but generally we never were able to measure them. Maybe now we might start to be able to do it.

But let’s go back to the tag weight. Terrell Russell took the ball, and in one evening of programming presented a tool to actually see how the weights change in time.

Nothing to say about the tool. It works perfectly well, and although it can be enhanced in many little ways, it already is very useful. Not bad for one evening.

More interesting, from my point of view, is how, through this tool we can see changes in the culture we are living in. We are used to feel those changes, but generally we never were able to measure them. Maybe now we might start to be able to do it.

No change

Tag Clouds rapidly converging

First of all I would like to show you the graph of a part of the culture where no changes are happening:
From the site: Nifty Corners. 1859 people having bookmarked it by now. The values soon converge to what we can expect to be their definite value (for the culture we are in).

Little Social-Quake

Tag Clouds showing a small quake

Now a place where no change are happening, but we see some tremor during a well defined time: from the site: Essential Fonts For Designers | 300 Free Truetype Fonts You Should Have. 2398 people having bookmarked it by now. The values generally converge. Yet, around the 20 and the 30 of february 2005 there seem to be some changes. And the change touched all the tags. They all raised. Now someone might ask, how is this possible? Don’t they have to balance? If one raises, don’t the other have to go down? And the answer is no. Not in this kind of graph. Here the weight is set in respect to the number of people that bookmarked a site. And everybody uses more tags to bookmark their site, then the of each tag raises. As I said the tag weight defines a point in the n dimensional hypercube (Hn), not in the n standard simplex (Sn). If we want the point to lie on Sn we either need to use the formula:

  • weight of tag t: # people using t/#total number of tags used
    where (#total number of tags used) means the sum of the multiplicity of each tag

or a more complicated one that I will explain ones I learn how to write math formula on my blog. (Suggestions welcome!).

But if the point were to lie on Sn then we would expect if something raises something else would drop. So I oofer two possible explenation for what happened in the way the font site has been bookmarked at the end of february of this year. 1) the new posting interface from delicious went popular (it was already public before, just not well known) , and people started to use more tags for each post. 2) the link was handed to a subculture which tended to use on average more tags for each post (a situation similar to Clay’s suggestion). Having a moving average of the number of tags people use would probably solve this.

Rapid Cultural Changes: The spreading of the ‘Ajax’ concept

Tag Cloud with Ajax tag growing

Now let’s look at some more precise changes. Ajax is a new way of organising the user interface, where a browser and a website comunicates some information that let the web page appear differently, without having to reload the whole page. It’s quite new. When the information came out people could feel it was important, but not many people would sign on having the tag ‘ajax’ in their tag list. But when the same site was bookmarked at a lter time, by people who wanted to know about ajax, they would know that ‘ajax’ was a keyword. So they tended to use it more often.
Look at the graph, it is refering to the page: adaptive path » ajax: a new approach to web applications. 2333 people having bookmarked it. Most values converge. Yet they are being cut diagonally by the red line raising: the term ‘ajax’.

Tag Cloud with Ajax tag growing
Culture are a decentralised process, and there is no central repository of it. Some group of people might be done with a change, while others are still in the middle of the process.

And here. Different site, but same cultural change. The term Ajax, this time in light blue cuts through the graph. In both cases the change started around half of february. Which suggest that it might be linked with the little earthquake we noticed before. But it is way too early to tell.

Culture are a decentralised process, and there is no central repository of it (whatever the central library might tell you). Some group of people might be done with a change, while others are still in the middle of the process.

Tag Cloud with Ajax tag growing

So for the geeks bookmarking XMLHttpRequest & Ajax Working Examples … (left box) the term was there from the 10 of March. And no big change can be seen.

Tag Cloud with Ajax tag growing

Instead for the people bookmarking the simpler tutorial on the same argument (right box): Guide to Using XMLHttpRequest (with Baby Steps) from WebPasties the change is very much happening. Not only does the term cuts through the graph always growning, but also has a big increase around the 10th of May. Showing that the percolation of the term through the layers of society have not yet done. And this is probably general. Pages for non experts will point back to places in society where the change is still happening, while pages for experst will point back to people who know the terms and when to use it.

Change, Change Everywhere

Changes like this can be seen everywhere: Another term that is raising is greasemonkey. And some term raise slowly, like wikipedia or freeware

And then you have situation where it is not the general culture that changes, but who it is that uses the tool. ‘Housing‘ have always been an issue. I don’t believe that the term can be more important now than one month ago. Yet the term is undeniably rising. Slowly but it is. I think this is due to the general expansion of delicious, out of the geek box it was born, and into a wider world of people who use it for more common uses. Or the recognition from our geek comunity that we need a roof too (but this I don’t believe).

There is quite a lot of information that can be extracted from those maps, and hats off for Terrell that first made a tool available to study them. I said before that the tool could be enhanced, and of course it can. No tool is ever finished. And I don’t want to spoil to Terrell the creativity to find all the things that can be done to make it better. Thanks also to Populicious fro providing the popular website, and of course to del.icio.us.

ADDENDUM:: Terrell Russell said he has no comments enabled in his site for the moment, so he will “monitor this post and comments for ideas until then. Feel free to offer suggestions“. Feel free to comment here, for the time being, to reach him.

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May 28th, 2005 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Category: alive, digest, publishable, root

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