Why we tag: motivations for annotation in mobile and online media

Why do people tag? Users have mostly avoided annotating media such as photos ? both in desktop and mobile environments ? despite the many potential uses for annotations, including recall and retrieval. We investigate the incentives for annotation in Flickr, a popular web-based photo-sharing system, and ZoneTag, a cameraphone photo capture and annotation tool that uploads images to Flickr. In Flickr, annotation (as textual tags) serves both personal and social purposes, increasing incentives for tagging and resulting in a relatively high number of annotations. ZoneTag, in turn, makes it easier to tag cameraphone photos that are uploaded to Flickr by allowing annotation and suggesting relevant tags immediately after capture. A qualitative study of ZoneTag/Flickr users exposed various tagging patterns and emerging motivations for photo annotation. We offer a taxonomy of motivations for annotation in this system along two dimensions (sociality and function), and explore the various factor...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Morgan Ames, Mor Naaman
• Keywords: Author Keywords Annotation, CHI 2007, Human Computer Interaction, Photo Annotation, User-based Annotation