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Semiotic dynamics in online social communities

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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 be used to explain the observed frequency distributions in terms of a simple model of user behavior

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche “Enrico Fermi” Compendio Viminale, 00184, Roma, Italy

    Ciro Cattuto

  2. Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, P.le A. Moro, 2, 00185, Roma, Italy

    Ciro Cattuto

Authors
  1. Ciro Cattuto
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Correspondence to Ciro Cattuto.

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Cattuto, C. Semiotic dynamics in online social communities. Eur. Phys. J. C 46 (Suppl 2), 33–37 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjcd/s2006-03-004-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjcd/s2006-03-004-4

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