SparTag.us and Click2Tag: Lowering the interaction cost of tagging systems

Tagging systems such as del.icio.us and Diigo have become important ways for users to organize information gathered from the Web. However, despite their popularity among early adopters, tagging still incurs a relatively high interaction cost for the general users.

To understand the costs of tagging, for each of these systems, we performed a GOMS-like analysis of the interface and identified the overall number of steps involved in tagging. We count these steps to get a gross measure of the tagging costs:

System         Cost
del.icio.us    6
MyWeb            7
Diigo            8
Clipmarks   10
Magnolia    6
Bluedot            6
Google Notebook   11

Tagging is a process that associates keywords with specific content. We did a rough analysis in our paper (reference below), and computed how often a keyword used by a user to tag an URL appears in the page content. We found that, on average, the chance that a tag comes from the content is 49%. This process produced a conservative estimate of tag occurrence in content, since we did not account for situations such as content changes for a given URL (e.g., dynamic content), typos (e.g., “Ajaz” instead of “Ajax”), abbreviations (e.g., “ad” instead of “advertisement”), compound tags (e.g., “SearchEngine”), and tags written in languages other than that of the content.

The following figure shows the probability distribution of a tag occurring in the page content:



We introduce a new tagging system called SparTag.us, which uses an intuitive Click2Tag technique to provide in situ, low cost tagging of web content. In SparTag.us, we bring the tagging capability into the same browser window displaying the web page being read. When a user loads a web page in his browser, we augment the HTML page with AJAX code to make the paragraphs of the web pages as well as the words of the paragraphs live and clickable. As users read a paragraph, they can simply click on any words in the paragraph to tag it.

SparTag.us also lets users highlight text snippets and automatically collects tagged or highlighted paragraphs into a system-created notebook, which can be later browsed and searched. We're currently conducting an internal PARC beta-testing of this tool, and hope to release it for public use in the near future.

For more detail about the system we built, here is the reference:

Lichan Hong, Ed H. Chi, Raluca Budiu, Peter Pirolli, and Les Nelson.
SparTag.us: Low Cost Tagging System for Foraging of Web Content.
In Proceedings of the Advanced Visual Interface (AVI2008),
pp. 65--72. ACM Press, 2008.

Talk video: Enhancing the Social Web through Augmented Social Cognition research

PARC Forum: May 1, 2008, 4:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA ,USA

Enhancing the Social Web through Augmented Social Cognition research

Ed Chi, PARC Augmented Social Cognition group

We are experiencing the new Social Web, where people share, communicate, commiserate, and conflict with each other. As evidenced by Wikipedia and del.icio.us, Web 2.0 environments are turning people into social information foragers and sharers. Users interact to resolve conflicts and jointly make sense of topic areas from "Obama vs. Clinton" to "Islam."

PARC's Augmented Social Cognition researchers -- who come from cognitive psychology, computer science, HCI, sociology, and other disciplines -- focus on understanding how to "enhance a group of people's ability to remember, think, and reason". Through Web 2.0 systems like social tagging, blogs, Wikis, and more, we can finally study, in detail, these types of enhancements on a very large scale.

In this Forum, we summarize recent PARC work and early findings on: (1) how conflict and coordination have played out in Wikipedia, and how social transparency might affect reader trust; (2) how decreasing interaction costs might change participation in social tagging systems; and (3) how computation can help organize user-generated content and
metadata.


Bio:
Ed H. Chi is a senior research scientist and area manager of PARC's Augmented Social Cognition group. His previous work includes understanding Information Scent (how users navigate and make sense of information environments like the Web), as well as developing information visualizations such as the "Spreadsheet for Visualization" (which allows users to explore data through a spreadsheet metaphor where each cell holds an entire data set with a full-fledged visualization). He has also worked on computational molecular biology, ubiquitous computing systems, and recommendation and personalized search engines. Ed has over 19 patents and has been conducting research on user interface software systems since 1993. He has been quoted in the Economist, Time Magazine, LA Times, Slate, and the Associated Press. Ed completed his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Minnesota between 1992 and 1999. In his spare time, he is an avid Taekwondo black belt, photographer, and snowboarder.

Charlene Li writes and talks about the groundswell and the power of social applications

Charlene Li of Forrester recently came to PARC and gave an excellent talk on the transforming power of social applications on businesses.

She defined the "groundswell" as the "social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations". She illustrates this idea with examples. She writes in the MIT Sloan Management Review recently: Brian Finkelstein recently made an YouTube video of a Comcast repairman who was put on hold with a call back to the home office for so long that he fell asleep on Brian's couch. This video was an instant hit with over 1 million viewings and counting.

Take the opposite example that happened with the CBS tv series "Jericho". After CBS canceled the show, fans organized themselves and sent 20 tons of peanuts to the president of CBS entertainment, taking the cue from a character in the show who loved using the phrase "nuts!" CBS listened and engaged with the online fans and asked them to watch the re-launched show to help boost its ratings.

In the talk, she also mentioned examples of companies such as Dell using idea markets to engage customers directly. But of course, there are risks. She mentions the loss of control as the major risk. As an example, when Walmart created a social application on Facebook, it became a magnet for anti-Walmart comments and discussions. For ways to mitigate these risks, you will have to read the MIT Sloan article and watch the video:

Premal Shah's Kiva talk at PARC stresses the importance of Social Transparency

As mentioned previously, Premal Shah of Kiva.org recently spoke at the PARC's special speaker series on "Going Beyond Web2.0". During the talk, Premal gave many great stories of how Kiva got started and the growth of the system. It was a great talk, because it showed that Web2.0 can be used as a way to connect people directly and to help them to get out of poverty. The way Kiva.org does this is through microloans.

The key, according to Premal, is transparency. At the talk, he said, "The reason why people dig Kiva is because of the transparency." This coincides with our "social transparency" principle that went into the design of WikiDashboard---we make the data visible and easier to understand, and you decide on how to use the information. Premal used the same principle here in the design of Kiva. For example, he said that they expose on the website the risk rating of various microloan organizations, and it is up to the users to decide on how much risk they want to take with their loans. The idea here is that a "social investor" in microloans need all of the information and make the decision locally in a distributed way. If enough people votes with their $25 loans, then a higher-risk loan can still get funded. Indeed, "people funded $25 at a time can actually beat Citibank's $100M microfinance total fund."

Incidentally, Katie Payne, who is giving the PARC forum on how to measure social media effects, is just now talking about the importance of "transparency" in building credibility and trust.

In any case, here is the Premal's Kiva talk:

Ed Chi talking about Augmented Social Cognition at Google

Recently, I gave a talk over at Google about the efforts we're starting here at PARC on Augmented Social Cognition (ASC). The Google video archive of the talk can be found here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3491597281548199656





Interesting enough, it was already blogged by someone at AOL Search here.