Social people-tagging vs. social bookmark-tagging

Abstract

Tagging has been widely used and studied in various domains. Recently, people-tagging has emerged as a means to categorize contacts, and is also used in some social access control mechanisms. In this paper, we investigate whether there are differences between people-tagging and bookmark-tagging. We show that the way we tag documents about people, who we do not know personally, is similar to the way we tag online documents (i.e., bookmarks) about other categories (i.e., city, country, event). However, we show that the tags assigned to a document related to a friend, differ from the tags assigned to someone we do not know personally. We also analyze whether the age and gender of a taggee - a person, who is tagged by others - have influences on social people-tags (i.e., people-tags assigned in social Web 2.0 platforms). © 2010 Springer-Verlag.