
Understanding Navigability of Social Tagging Systems (alt.chi 2007 paper with reviews, pdf) - amichail
http://www.viktoria.se/altchi/index.php?action=showsubmission&id=39
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blader
Useful for people evaluating whether to use a tag cloud as navigation

"We analyzed a popular social tagging site, del.icio.us, using information
theory. By analyzing various kinds of entropy, which is a traditional
information theory metric, we found that, over time, del.icio.us is becoming
harder to navigate. Moreover, the collective of users (the crowd) is having a
harder time in tagging documents as the collection of bookmarks grows
unabated. This is somewhat intuitive, since the amount of information being
bookmarked is growing extremely fast, and the usage and growth of the Indeed,
design changes and tools for social tagging are tagging vocabulary become much
more saturated. Entropy, as a metric, can also be used to drive system design
choices. We discussed several social tagging tools or modifications to social
tagging that could benefit from using entropy to evaluate the effects. It is
our hope that HCI researchers will utilize this methodology to characterize
future social and collaborative information systems."

