Social Tagging: Community Tagging or Personal Tagging in Communities?

Abstract

Social tagging can be described as .the collective assignment of keywords to resources. (Trant, 2006). How much do people who use social tagging tools take into account the context of their community when they tag? Do they use different terminology when they are purposely tagging items for a community compared to when they are use tagging tools with only themselves in mind? Some virtual communities will use a specific tag that allows for items with that tag to be .advertised. within that virtual community. By looking at the differences in tag terminology used by people in such a community when they included a tag associated with a community versus when then do not, it might be possible to discover what influence community has in the choice of tags, and to what extent people consciously consider community context while tagging.