Super Taggers

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.