Y!RB Brain Jam: Marti Hearst (UCB) - Thoughts on Social Tagging

(Free and open to the public - and followed at 4pm with a Social Jam that includes refreshments - and beer. It would be helpful if you mark attending/watching above).

Thoughts on Social Tagging

ABSTRACT:
From blogging to human-response search engines to local recommendation sites to powerpoint slide sharing sites, social media is booming in popularity. One important aspect of this phenomenon, which occurs across many different types of social media, is social tagging, or "folksonomies". In social tagging, users assign short, usually atomic category names to shared resources, such as photos or web pages. The tagging method is powerful as it requires little effort on the part of the user to tag, but can lead to what some consider a disorganized mess as tags are generally not drawn from a well thought-out vocabulary system.

There has as yet not been much academic work on this rapidly emerging phenomenon. In this talk I will discuss work in progress on the topic of social tagging. I plan to cover these topics:

o A discussion of the relationship between faceted metadata and tags
o Some research issues on social tagging for search
o A discussion of some qualitative work I've done on tag clouds

BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Marti Hearst is an associate professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, with an affiliate appointment in the Computer Science Division. Her primary research interests are user interfaces and visualization for search engines, computational linguistics, and empirical analysis of social media.