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."
"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."