This is an awful analysis.<p>Flickr tags are by people categorizing their own photos (that is, publisher-generated categorization.) Not people categorizing things they've found or aren't theirs. This leads to radically different behavior. Given this is a librarian, the second case is much more relevant and interesting.<p>One analysis without understanding the space or how the subject differs from the desired outcome (that is, categorization) seems very embarassingly shallow.<p>(Yes, this annoyed me the first time I read it, a while ago.)
Les Orchard (who used to work for delicious.com) has a good response to this article. Part of his argument is that Flickr is a really bad place to start a tag analysis, since people generally only tag their own stuff (the big win for tags comes when lots of people provide their personal tags for a single entity, meaning you can look at the data in aggregate). <a href="http://decafbad.com/blog/2009/01/18/tags-do-work-for-me-at-least" rel="nofollow">http://decafbad.com/blog/2009/01/18/tags-do-work-for-me-at-l...</a>
The findings basically show that people generally don’t use verbs when tagging and that the titles and descriptions they write are almost always a more useful definition of the thing being tagged (especially when searching across large datasets).