The Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Tagging: Evaluation of Delicious Website1 Ruslan Lecturer of Library Science Department Faculty of Letter and Humanism Ar-Raniry State Islamic University Banda Aceh - Indonesia E-mail: [email protected] Introduction The internet is the fastest growing and largest tool for mass communication and information distribution in the world. It can be used to distribute large amounts of information anywhere in the world at a minimal cost. This progress also can be seen from the emergence of Web 2.02, a form of social computing which engages consumers at the grassroots level in systems that necessitate creative, collaborative or information sharing tasks. Web 2.0 encompasses social bookmarking, blogging, wikis and online social networking among others. One of the ways users can do this is through tagging. Tagging is referred to with several names: collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, folksonomy, etc. The basic principle is that end users do subject indexing instead of experts only, and the assigned tags are being shown immediately on the Web (Voss, 2007). Nowadays, social bookmarking systems have been successful in attracting and retaining users. This success initially originated from members’ ability to centrally store bookmarks on the web. 1 This is assignment paper of author when studying in School of Information Science, McGill University, Montreal-Canada, 2009. 2 Web 2.0 is a set of economic, social, and technology trends that collectively form the basis for the next generation of the Internet—a more mature, distinctive medium characterized by user participation, openness, and network effects. See John Musser, p.1. Furthermore, these systems also allowing users to organize their bookmarks by assigning tags that reflect directly their own vocabulary and needs. The collection of user-assigned tags is referred to commonly as a folksonomy. Users are able to browse or search the folksonomies in order to find documents of interest. Although social tagging or social bookmarking is a recent phenomenon which has the potential to give us a great deal of data about pages on the web, it also has a number of weaknesses in the way that classifiers organize information. In this paper will be described the advantages and disadvantages of social tagging as a way to index content to facilitate retrieval. This is followed by an example into the specifics of Delicious site as a part of folksonomy sites. Definition of Social Tagging and Folksonomy Social tagging is a method of organizing information. A tag is a non- hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy (Wikipedia, 2009). Another definition stated that tagging is an act of organizing through labeling, a way of making sense of many discrete, varied items according to their meaning. By looking at those tags, we can examine what kinds of distinctions are important to taggers (Golder and Huberman, 2006). Tags are words or phrases users attach to a web site/page. Tags are simply labels for web resources, selected to help the user in later retrieval of those web resources. Tags have the additional effect of grouping related web resources together. There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. A user can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to him/her, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements. With tagging, anyone is free to use the words s/he thinks are appropriate, without having to agree with anyone else about how something "should" be tagged (Shirky 2005), Educause Learning Initiative (2005) described that social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public web site and ``tagging`` them with keywords. Bookmarking, on the other hand, is the practice of saving the address of a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer. To create a collection of social bookmarks, you register with a social bookmarking site, which lets you store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate individual bookmarks as public or private. Some sites periodically verify that bookmarks still work, notifying users when a URL no longer functions. Visitors to social bookmarking sites can search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved. Another term in this paper is folksonomy also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomy is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. It describes the bottom-up classification systems that emerge from social tagging. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary (Wikipedia, 2009). Hammon (2005) said that a folksonomy is a type of distributed classification system. It is usually created by a group of individuals, typically the resource users. Users add tags to online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks and text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined. Basically, the word folksonomy is a portmanteau of the words folks and taxonomy coined by Thomas Vander Wal which implies that it can be understood as an organization of web contents by folks or users. An important aspect of a folksonomy as mentioned by Adam Mates (2004) is that is comprised of terms in a flat namespace: that is, there is no hierarchy, and no directly specified parent-child or sibling relationships between these terms. There are, however, automatically generated “related” tags, which cluster tags based on common URLs. This is unlike formal taxonomies and classification schemes where there are multiple kind of explicit relationships between terms. These relationships include things like broader, narrower, as well as related terms. These folksonomies are simply the set of terms that a group of users tagged content with, they are not a predetermined set of classification terms or labels. Tagging Content in Delicious Delicious is the most popular social bookmarking site Del.icio.us, or Delicious, is a collaborative tagging system for web bookmarks that its creator, Joshua Schachter, calls a “social bookmarks manager.” According to the site itself, Delicous is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet (Delicious, 2009). On this page, all the bookmarks the user has ever created are displayed in reverse-chronological order along with a list of all the tags the user has ever given to a bookmark. By selecting a tag, a user can filter his/her bookmark list so that only bookmarks with that tag are displayed (Golder and Huberman 2006). Once they have an account, users can bookmark webpages through Delicious using a special bookmark on their browser. They can optionally tag their bookmarks as well, and search and browse using those tags. When browsing tags on the Delicious site, users can see all bookmarks that all users have tagged with that particular tag, not just their own personal collection (Mathes, 2004). Delicious is really interesting, on their front page (see Figure 1.1), we will see not only display of the most popular bookmarks, but also the popular tags (see Figure 1.3.) that help user to know popular information faster and easily. Another important thing of Delicious site is using popular tag cloud (see Figure 1.2). Delicious has specific definition on tag cloud and tag. Tag cloud is a list of tags where size reflects popularity. In addition, a tag is simply a word you can use to describe a bookmark. Unlike folders, you make up tags when you need them and you can use as many as you like. The result is a better way to organize your bookmarks and a great way to discover interesting things on the Web. Tag cloud could be displayed by size or alphabet. Figure 1.1. Delicious Homepage and Snapshoot of Popular Bookmarks Figure 1.2. Delicious Popular Tag Cloud Figure 1.3. Popular tags on Delicious, as of March 16, 2009 Advantages of Social tagging Browsability Browsing is extremely fruitful using social tags and folksonomies. As mentioned Mathes (2004), that tags allow us to see what resources others have found useful, what things these resources might be useful for, and what other terms you might want to search under. This could be seen from Delicious site that is helpful if a user accesses information freely. Through others' personal pages and the "popular" page, users can get a sense of what other people find interesting. By browsing specific people and tags, users can find web resources that are of interest to them and can find people who have common interests. Tagging reflects users' vocabulary Tagging directly represents the vocabulary of users, because they are the ones creating the metadata. Popular tags show us what terms are preferred by the group. This can lead to the creation of new controlled vocabularies that might be easier to search because they would better reflect users' language. Kroski said (2005) put another way, folksonomies are inclusive because users are participants and experts, and because users see themselves reflected in the metadata.