Hewlet Packard has released a nice whitepaper titled The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems (link to PDF). The research by the authors found that:
They discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given URI.
A fancy word for these collaborative tagging systems is folksonomies,and it’s one of the buzzwords of the last year. More and more energy is being put into categorizing information that comes at us so readily on the web; it’s unavoidable that we would now have to put a priority on making sense of it all. Studies like this might serve to indicate that these user generated categorization systems might not be as random as you might fear.
