Content Matters

...according to a December, 2006 study just released by Lee Rainie and the team at Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Effective tagging has long been considered the "holy grail" for improving information retrieval.  While tagging can dramatically improve search results for text, it's even more critical for graphics, audio and video content.

Publishers have long known this and have employed editors (originally as employees, but now largely outsourced) or technology to categorize and tag their content.  Then a few years ago, the idea of folksonomies, or community-based tagging, popped up, with the advent of  delicious, RawSugar, flickr and other applications.  But, until now, most of us have assumed that it was just a sliver of users doing the tagging.  Delicious, the most renowned of the tagging platforms, has only 1 million users and of those, only a modest percentage are active taggers.

According to the new Pew study, 28% of all online users surveyed have tagged a page, a photograph, video or blog post.  Overall, 7% of the 2,400 users in the survey tag content on a daily basis.  Pew phrased the question as "Please tell me if you ever use the internet to categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story, or a blog post.”  As such, they are capturing an audience of users who probably don't even think of what they are doing as tagging.

What would be interesting is to see how much tagging is being done to other people's content vs. their own.  When I browse through flickr or youtube, I see most content is tagged reasonably well.  That makes sense as users are tagging it either to make it easier for them to find their own stuff or to help it be discovered by others.  While you'd expect all content creators to follow that approach, a random look at blog posts shows that most bloggers do not bother to apply Technorati tags to their posts.  Delicious, on the other hand, is more of a bookmarking service, so you gain the benefit of a community tagging other people's content.  But, as indicated, participation is low.

The Pew study points out that demographics come into play here.  Most taggers are under-40, well educated and have higher income.  Over time, as tagging applications provide greater benefits to users, tagging should continue to increase.  And information retrieval should continue to improve.

The study may be downloaded free of charge at the Pew site.