A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community
Categorised under: Information architecture
Ulises Ali Mejias has conducted a study into the social classification used on del.icio.us. To quote:
Working within the constraints of a very limited data sample, this study attempts to identify some of the information management and meaning construction practices of an online distributed classification (a.k.a. free tagging or ethnoclassification) community. Specifically, this study seeks to investigate the social and communicative practices that emerge when users are encouraged to share web links with one another by using a metadata keyword, or tag, to demark a social group, apart from using other tags to classify links according to an emergent taxonomy.
[Thanks to ia/.]
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 