Social tagging systems have recently developed as a popular method of data
organisation on the Internet. These systems allow users to organise their
content in a way that makes sense to them, rather than forcing them to use a
pre-determined and rigid set of categorisations. These folksonomies provide
well populated sources of unstructured tags describing web resources which
could potentially be used as semantic index terms for these resources. However
getting people to agree on what tags best describe a resource is a difficult
problem, therefore any feature which increases the consistency and stability of
terms chosen would be extremely beneficial. We investigate how the provision of
a tag cloud, a weighted list of terms commonly used to assist in browsing a
folksonomy, during the tagging process itself influences the tags produced and
how difficult the user perceived the task to be. We show that illustrating the
most popular tags to users assists in the tagging process and encourages a
stable and consistent folksonomy to form.Comment: SIGIR 2009 Workshop on Search in Social Media (SSM 2009
