The Semantics of Tagging - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 127

Fig. 5.10 Ranked frequency distribution repeating suggested tags

exaggerated top of the distribution in the 'tag suggestion' condition. In order to
provide a measurement of the number of suggested tags in the top of the distribution,
the percentage of suggested tags that were found in the top 7 and top 10 tags
were calculated. We compared the percentage of suggested tags in the top 7 and
top 10 ranks for both conditions with del.icio.us. For this we assume that the
seven suggested tags provided by del.icio.us represent the top 7 tags in the ranked
frequency distribution so that the percentage of suggested tags in the top 7 and top
10 ranks for del.icio.us is equal to 100%. We averaged the percentages for all URIs
per experimental condition.
Figure 5.10 shows that for the percentage of suggested tags available in the top
7 rank for the 'tag suggestion' condition is 80

.

51% and for the 'no tag' suggestion

.

condition 51 93%. This means that only half of the suggested tags can be found in

the top 7 of the ranked frequency distribution in the 'no tag suggestion' condition.
So unsurprisingly, in the 'tag suggestion' condition, we observed more of the
suggested tags than in the 'no tag suggestion' condition. There is an influence of
tag suggestions on the ranked position and the frequency of the suggested tags. Tag
suggestions do influence the tag-resource distribution, as tag suggestion causes a
net gain of nearly one in three tags being imitated that would otherwise not be.
However, when users are not guided by tag suggestions and tag freely they still
choose for themselves half of the tags that would have been otherwise suggested had
they had a 'tag suggestion' mechanism available. Further we look at the availability
of suggested tags in the top 10 as an indication of how dispersed the suggested
tags are in the ranked frequency distribution for both conditions. For the top 10
rank Fig. 5.10 shows that the percentage of suggested tags in the 'tag suggestion'
condition is 88

.

30% and for the “no tag suggestion” condition is 61.03%.