Tagging, Sharing and the Influence of Personal Experience

Social bookmarking or tagging is the process of assigning and sharing among users, freely selected terms to resources. This approach is a form of user-generated metadata and allows users to locate new resources through the collective intelligence of other users. Social tagging offers a new avenue for resource discovery as compared to taxonomies and subject directories created by experts. While social tagging has its advantages, one possible drawback is that tag creators, who come with different preferences, experiences, and beliefs, among other factors, may view the same document differently and therefore apply different tags even though they may have the same goal of content organization and sharing. In this paper, we argue that familiarity is an important issue to be investigated in social tagging systems, and our goal is to examine the influence of the level of familiarity with social tagging on the effectiveness of tags for content sharing. We found that high familiarity with the concept of tagging, Web directories, and social tagging systems are significantly and positively associated with high tag effectiveness for content sharing. Implications of our findings and opportunities for future work are discussed.