Super Taggers

The analysis of Technorati user tagging makes it possible to question the Technorati community in a new multifaceted way without anybody having to do any extra work, other than apply some very simple automated rules.

For example, from the ‘Medium of communication’ facet, a blog-reader could choose, say ‘Movies’ and ‘Movie’ combined with ‘Family’ from the ‘Personal’ facet and ‘Reviews’ from the ‘Point of view’ facet. The facets enable much richer questioning of the sources than looking down indexes, or random key word searching.

Looking at the analysis, it is impossible to miss the fact that ‘Purposely unclassified’ is the fourth most popular tags facet. Frankly, this kind of tag does not add a lot of value to the community. On the other hand, as part of a multi-faceted question injecting an element of ‘random’, ‘randomness’, and ‘Random elements’ might be desirable for those in search of serendipity.

How people go about tagging and searching Technorati must be an indication of what they are thinking about and what they believe is important.

Here is what content analysis suggests are the six most used categories of tags on Technorati. During the next couple of weeks, the plan is to carry out an introductory analysis of what people are talking about under each of these supertags.

1) Medium of communication – 2,825,217 items tagged
2) Personal – 1,065,158 items tagged
3) Points of view – 791,935 items tagged
4) Purposely unclassified – 782,950 items tagged
5) Technology – 690,903 items tagged
6) News – 353,916 items tagged

By far the most tags are about a Medium of Communication, with Weblog being the most common tag of all by a factor of more than 2. Does the fact that 1.7 million items are tagged Weblog mean that people are mainly into blogging about blogging? Or does it mean that hundreds of thousands of Japanese bloggers automatically tag all their blogs as Weblogs, even if their content has nothing to do with Weblogs? A cursory look at the latest blogs suggests that the Japanese auto-tagging hypothesis would be worth looking into.

If tags are to have any meaning at all, then massive uncertainties like these must be understood and clarified. Otherwise, people are just wasting each other’s time which works against the interests of any community.

Once the issue of generally agreed meanings is surmounted, the problem with the alphabetical nature of listing can begin to be addressed. Once again, Technorati’s most popular tag illustrates the difficulty. Different tags professing to mean more or less the same thing under ‘b’ for ‘blogs’, ‘m’ for ‘Metroblogs’, ‘Metblogs’ and ‘My Blogs’, and ‘w’ for Weblogs. One agreed supertag, say Weblogs to bring them all together, along with a few subtags to distinguish more specific concepts, such as ‘Metro Met blogs’, which are blogs about urban regions.

The second most evoked Medium of Communication on Technorati could be categorised as the ‘Written Word’ with potential subtags including ‘books’, ‘book’, ‘writing’, ‘words’, ‘Poem’, ‘Poetry’, and ‘Love Poems’. Although heartening for those who value literacy, the popularity of this group of tags is hardly surprising given that blogging uses the written word. Top rated tags, however, also exist for many other communications media led by ‘Movie’ and ‘Movies’ where were4 used to tag approximately 110,000 blogs. Media executives might be interested to know that Technorati community members are a lot more interested in blogging photography and podcasts than about television.

In the next, blog the second most popular supertag, Personal, will be analysed and it will then be seen how supertags enable a new type of multi-faceted question to be be asked of the Technorati community.

Tags are the leaves on the tree, categories (or supertags) are the branches on which they must hang. The fruit is the knowledge to which the tags point.

This Technorati tags analysis is a first step in new supertagging project which aims to bring bloggers the benefits of classification systems (also known as ‘taxonomies’) without all the pain and the jargon. As the author of the best-selling “Taxonomies: Frameworks for Corporate Knowledge” (which sells to corporates at £395 a copy), I believe I can give this public supertagging project some useful guidance and assistance. Material on this blog will be used in a new book, “Taxonomies for taggers: Giving more power to the people” (£5 for a .pdf copy) which will show taggers how to benefit, both themselves and their communities, from the knowing some of the tricks, the mistakes and shortcuts to improving on their ever growing alphabetical list of tags using taxonomies.

To work in the user-led world of bloggers where basic service is provided at no cost, supertags must be free. Therefore, all classification schemas contained on the Supertaggers blog are available for use without copyright restriction, although it is recommended users join the supertaggers conferences (when they are set up) in order to suggest changes, receive updates and to discuss usage issues.

This supertagging project is dedicated to using supertags as a both means of improving the findability of blogs and of monitoring what they are saying. Technorati was chosen as the first to be analysed because it is one of the biggest blog tagging communities in the world with more than 21 million participating bloggers.

The first finding is that Technorati’s top 200-odd English tags can be analysed into 12 top-level categories. All tags fit consistently into the meaning of each category. There was no need to assign two categories to any tags or to use the dreaded Misc., non-category. (For the categories and stats relating to the top Technorati tags, see last week’s posting.)

Of course, all blogs can be categorised with more than one tag. Each tag represents a different facet of the item being described.

Simply, by adding this single level of supertags, Technorati’s very, very long alphabetical list becomes a simple, easy-to-use, multi-faceted taxonomy giving blogs a new dimension in findability … the multifaceted query.

Instead of random words shot in the dark, a multifaceted query enables users to find and to combine whole sets of tagged blogs at once in order to isolate what is most of interest to them. Even with the vast majority of people tagging privately as is now the case, the automatic sorting of tags under a set of top level supertags, as has been done in this Technorati pilot, adds value to a random alphabetical list without adding any significant cost for any of the stakeholders, whether readers, writers or service providers.

If groups of collaborative bloggers went further and decided to develop and share common classification terms, the benefits of multifaceted supertagging in terms of findability and intelligence gathering would be dramatically extended.

That is not to say that this analysis is the only (or even the best) categorisation of Technorati’s top tags. It is useful, though, in giving both some meaning and some critical appraisal of how users are tagging their blogs.

Tip 1: The key to getting started is first try to agree on some very general top level classifications.

Next week’s Blog will make some inferences about what Technorati users are thinking about from the pilot analysis.

The top Technorati tags make an intriguing and meaningful fit in the following super-categories.

1) Communications media – 2,825,217

2) Personal – 1,065,158

3) Points of view – 791,935

4) Purposely unclassified – 782,950

5) Technology – 690,903

6) News – 353,916

7) Play – 229,958

8) Transport – 228,171

9) Business and Economics – 122,921

10) Wider contexts – 98,517

11) Places – 78,993

12) Politics and Law – 64,150

Categorisation is not right or wrong. Rather it works or it doesn't work. Here is Version 1.0 of top level Supertags for Technorati. It works because it juxtaposes like with like. It provides some information superstructure which gives added meaning to each list of tags. Its meaningful tag juxtapositions give tag users a much richer experience than ploughing through an alphabetical list. People can, if they should wish, use them right away by using these supertags as prefixes to their own tags on Technorati. Tags within each category are sorted with the most popular tags at the top. Use this organisation as the first step in searching the top Technorati Tags.

These tags also provide a basis for an analysis of what bloggers are doing. It also shows how some more collaborative tagging would eliminate a lot of waste. The next blog on this topic will be coming soon.

1) Medium of communication - 2,825,217
Weblog... 1,761,663 Blogs... 55,192, My blog... 8,904
metroblogs ... 14,751, metblogs... 14,732,
books...155,597, book... 40,257, Writing... 31,745, words... 18,884
Poem... 11,895, Poetry... 40,982 Love Poems... 6,307
Movies... 64,074, Movie... 45,462
Media... 84,266
Musica... 33,737, Musik... 18,583, Lyrics... 25,369
photo... 52,342, Photography... 35,605, Fotos... 15,060
Journal... 60,056
Video... 43,191, Videos... 15,974
Podcast... 25,166, Podcasts... 22,172
Pictures... 28,876
Television... 27,336
Live... 24,277
Website... 19,949
Anime... 16,182
Advertising... 13,776
Comics... 12,804

2) Personal - 1,065,158
Me... 86,705, About Me... 14,417, My Life... 64,467
hobbies 91,936 Hobby 16,211
Love... 82,518
Home... 77,892
Family... 77,503
Work... 71,266
Health and wellness 65,021
Fun... 50,963
Friends... 48,718
Food and Drink... 46,059
Funny... 37,498
Sex... 30,356, sexy... 6,933
Feeling... 21,315, Feelings... 10,745
Cooking... 13,419, Recipes... 14,654
Baby... 21,971
Shopping... 18,587
Mood... 17,919
fashion... 16,658
Shoes... 12,366
Private... 12,030
Knitting... 10,689
Relationships... 9,708
Babes... 9,572
Dogs... 7,089

3) Points of view - 791,935
Entertainment... 216,651
Reviews... 55,113, Review... 26,068,
Humor... 64,124
category... 59,166
Tips... 47,104
Ramblings... 30,719
Quotes... 28,891
Development... 27,516
fAcTs... 26,447
meme... 16,865, memes...9,682
History... 23,886
Announcements... 22,297
memo... 19,531
Amusement... 17,690
Rant... 17,485
Opinion... 17,098
Research... 16,781
test... 13,724
Philosophy... 13,013
Projects... 11,534
gossip... 10,104
Journalism... 10,046
dreams... 9,228
murmur... 8,289

4) Purposely unclassified - 782,950
random... 108,821, Randomness... 12,939, Random thoughts... 16,569
stuff... 133,301
Misc.... 63,493, miscellaneous... 37,950
thoughts... 79,199
2005... 75,969
days... 48,765
Resources... 39,303
etc... 32,385
uncategorized articles... 31,275
EveryDay... 27,171
Everything... 21,030
others... 18,486
Asides... 13,846
Whatever... 8,733
All Posts... 7,978
General Posting... 5,737

5 Technology - 690,903
Computers... 124,015, Computer... 45,713, Computing... 10,647,
PC... 37,202, Macintosh... 9,441
Computers and Internet... 90,366
software... 88,237
Apple... 35,923
Google... 34,685
Search... 29,528
wordpress... 22,645
Hardware... 21,856
Tools... 20,948
audio... 17,134
Wireless... 15,866
Java... 12,949
Spam ... 10,983
Firefox... 10,537
VoIP... 10,193
Flickr... 9,894
CSS... 9,337
Asterisk... 9,113
General webmaster threads... 8,687
Cell Phones... 5,004

6) News - 353,916
News and politics... 86,395
events... 71,218
Updates... 36,438
Weather... 11,645, Katrina... 22,555, Hurricane Katrina... 11,104
In The News... 25,118
Current events... 21,407
Site news... 18,183
General news... 17,514
Terrorism... 12,837
World news... 9,845
Latest News... 9,667

7) Play - 229,958
Games... 85,876, Game... 62,326
Football... 25,191
Baseball... 20,098
Poker... 18,509
Golf... 17,958

8) Transport - 228,171
Travel... 162,548, Voyages... 17,054
Car... 36,406, Cars... 12,163

9) Business and Economics - 122,921
Business... 86,786
Real Estate ... 25,811
Car Insurance... 5,375
Health Insurance... 4,949

10) Wider contexts - 98,517
Society... 20,941, People... 30,107
Organizations... 24,359
Environment... 11,756, Nature... 11,354

11) Places - 78,993
Iraq... 26,711
Europe... 15,102
USA... 13,654
China... 12,806
London... 10,720

12) Politics and Law - 64,150
Law... 30,146
Bush... 19,661
Military... 12,171
Legislation... 1,682
Votes... 490

Technorati Profile

By using a bit of clustering organisation, I aim to use supertags to give some meaning to the random alphabetic terms which form the 250 top tags on Technorati.