2.5 Million tags!
February 26th, 2006Something to add to my presentations. According to the Library Thing blog, the self classification/social software tool just hit 1.8 million books and 2.5 million tags.
I follow new features at LT closely, for obvious reasons. There are more matches for LT in my PubSub results on a daily basis than anything else I follow. It’s amazing how many people are using it. LT will continue to grow, no doubt about it. Librarians could learn a few things from LT on what makes book people tick. More from the blog on tags:
“As the tags accumulate, they are also generating a lot more value. Tags are mostly useful personally and statistically. Tags are often played up baselessly—as if a few scattered and general tags are of any use to anyone. For statistical purposes you need a LOT of tags, so frequency patterns can emerge and anomalous entries fade into the background. And tags are primarily interesting in concert, not by themselves. Because tags are non-heirarchical and often short, they lack the ‘context’ of something like the Library of Congress subject headings. Other tags can provide that context.”
“That’s why the ‘tag similarity’ algorithm takes many tags into account, favoring recommendations that match on more than one.”
Ah the joys of reader-centered online readers advisory.