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Will a tag get oversaturated and become meaningless or will it grow indefinitely

Now that tags had been accepted worldwide almost nobody is asking about the real meaning or its taxonomy anymore. Fortunately, in the Sapienza Roma's University, a group of physicists had taken seriously the issue about the Semiotic Dynamics and collaborative tagging very seriously.

The report is presented by Nikhil Swaminathan from the Scientific American and the head of all this statistical method known as Power Law is Ciro Catuto, Vittorio Loreto and Luciano Pietronero.

The problem was to study the behaviors of tags (other people prefer to refer to them as folksonomies and categories)on the social bookmarking/collaborative tagging sites like del.icio.us , Connotea or Flickr. After studying the manner in which certain tags were associated with a pair of selected ones this group of researchers found that user behavior in collaborative tagging schemes followed a Power Law in which certain words were highly associated with the chosen tags.

Being the first time we've got quantitative procedures to determined the tag's behaviour, not matter what's the coolest term but what the fundamental structures within the system are. Normally, according with the results of this new structure, information stays fresh on the Web for only about 36-48 hours, they also found that users on collaborative tagging sites would likely prefer recently added tags to older ones. Be careful with all those memes and tagging systems dear bloggers.

Catuto, writes:
Our simple modelling is able to account quantitatively for the measured frequency-rank properties of tag association, with a surprisingly high accuracy. This is a clear indication that collaborative tagging is able to recruit the uncoordinated actions of web users to create a predictable and coherent semiotic dynamics at the emergent level.

And he tries to put it simple, with an example:
[...] linking to a photo or article about New York City. The person posting the link can tag the item in several ways, a few of which are "nyc," "newyork_city," or newyork. The choices of previous del.icio.us users, however, are likely to influence the next group of users. "There is pressure, in essence," [...] "because if you use tags that are already widespread within the system, people are able to find your entries—so, using popular tags makes your content findable and makes you more visible.

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