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Semiotic dynamics in online social communities

. The European Physical Journal C - Particles and Fields, 46 (0): 33--37 (August 2006)

Abstract

Abstract  A distributed classification paradigm known as collaborative tagging has been successfully deployed in large-scale web applications designed to manage and share diverse online resources. Users of these applications organize resources by associating with them freely chosen text labels, or tags. Here we regard tags as basic dynamical entities and study the semiotic dynamics underlying collaborative tagging. We collect data from a popular system and focus on tags associated with a given resource.We find that the frequencies of tags obey to a generalized Zipf’s law and show that a Yule–Simon process with memory can beused to explain the observed frequency distributions in terms of a simple model of user behavior

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community