Clay, > Too much synch creates groupthink. As Pietro[1] and Terrell[2] have shown, > tag clouds move to an organic distribution pretty quickly, and disruptions > to those distributions, as with Pietro's Ajax example, are informative. > > All this happens without formal recommendations or coordination. would say
> Surowiecki that this happens *because* there are no formal recommendations > -- in the 'Wisdom of Crowds' view, this sort of decentralized independence > makes tagging more robust. Interesting point, but isn't this type of feedback loop an important characteristic of scale-free networks? The reason that web links, for example, have a power law distribution is exactly the fact that the most popular sites are the most linked to. My gut feeling is that giving strong feedback about the most popular tags for a given page will enhance, not diminish, the value of these tags by helping the cream to rise to the top. It should also help to eliminate tag forking, such as "delicious" vs. "del.icio.us" (although I've noticed from your past comments that you tend to see more value in this type of divergence than many people -- including myself -- would tend to). In any case, the nice thing about the new del.icio.us interface is that we can find out what the effect of the new interface is. Let's wait a couple of months and then compare the distribution of tags created using the older interface with what people are doing with the new one. This should provide plenty of data to judge whether the new approach encourages unhealthy group think. Matt _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
