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February 03, 2005

Tagging's power law

Ben Hyde looks at four popular bookmarks at del.icio.us and plots how many times each is tagged with the same word. E.g, BoingBoing is tagged as "blog" 200 times and as "news" 90 times. The curve is that of a classic power law: The most frequently used tags are used waaaay more frequently than lesser-used tags.

Ben stresses that four bookmarks don't constitute a significant sample, but wouldn't we expect a folksonomy to assume the shape of a power law distribution? [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy]

Posted by D. Weinberger at February 3, 2005 11:11 AM

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» No law, only unexplored territory from RatcliffeBrowse
Joho the Blog: Tagging's power law I hope we can avoid the power law fetish and recognize that two-dimensional displays of "power" are inadequate in a dynamic environment. But power laws are already being pointed to in tiny samples....... [Read More]

Tracked on February 3, 2005 01:22 PM

» No law, only unexplored territory from RatcliffeBrowse
Joho the Blog: Tagging's power law I hope we can avoid the power law fetish and recognize that two-dimensional displays of "power" are inadequate in a dynamic environment. But power laws are already being pointed to in tiny samples....... [Read More]

Tracked on February 3, 2005 01:23 PM

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