A few days ago Dr. Finin, Pranam and I were having a discussion about how tags are a pretty good representation of a person or an organization. A folksonomy is a simple, yet effective way to organize information around yourself, be it blogs published, feeds read or a collection of family pictures. A tag cloud is a culmination of the context a person lives in.

For instance, on the eBiquity site, we tag pretty much everything and this produces a nice tag cloud (also shown in the image). A quick glance at it can give a good picture of the kind of work we do. Similarly, here are a few snapshots of tag clouds from famous bloggers: Steve Rubel (from his site), Michael Arrington
(TechCrunch’s tag cloud from Technorati) and Arianna Huffington( Huffington Post from Technorati). It was interesting to find that not many A-listers use the delicious tagroll. In contrast to tags in posts, delicious tags are a good way to measure what one reads. Thus, together, the tagspace one uses represents what we read, write and think. We are what we do and so in a sense “Tags are US!”
On a related note, one of the research areas I am studying is modeling influence on the blogosphere. We are planing on exploring how knowing a person’s ‘tag cloud’ can help in modeling the topics they are interested in. We’d like to
acquire a collection of paired blogs and their author’s tag clouds and seek people who would be willing to contribute their information (i.e., blog URL and public tag URL) the collection.

We will use the information collected for research only. We will not use it for any commercial purposes. We will not disclose the URLs or their associated names in any publications. If you are willing please consider submitting the your blog and delicious URL by filling in this form.

The form allows you to check off whether you are willing to allow us to include the information in a dataset to be shared with researchers If you choose not to let us share the data, we will use it in our own internal research and neither make it part of any shared dataset nor share it with anyone outside of our research group.

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