A Study of User's Tagging Motivation and Factors of Choice Tag in Social Bookmarking Website

[[abstract]]Recently the user-oriented social software is flourishing, social bookmarking website is one of the most typical applications. It provide users to collect, classify, gather and share network resources, including the tagging function is to allows users to organize and interpret network resources. The users define and classify tags by themselves, unlike ordinary experts or intermediary organizational model. Therefore, the study investigate tagging behavior of the users in social bookmarking website, including their use of motivation, tags of contents, choose the principles and methods of tagging, but also to analyze the impact of possible factors. The study used Q methods, content analysis and interviews. Twenty-eight users in HEMiDEMI, Yahoo! Bookmark, My Share, and Search 2.0 test for the study. The choice of influential factors are: （1）situational factors, （2） personal factors, （3） bookmarks factors, and （4）social factors. The factors are the basis of declarative sentences for Q method, to explore users to choose the tagging consideration of the principles or methods, and the effects of factors. The study collect users’ one-month bookmarks to understand the content of the tag by content analysis. Finally, interviews is to explore the use of motivation. The results of study show that: （1） “ personal needs ” is the main motivation that using bookmarking website, “ control information ” is the main motivation that using tags, （2） the feature of tags include personal style, the Chinese form, and the structure of one-word, （3）based on the feature of choice tag, can be divided into four types: the network-centered sociality, the community-centered sociality, the information-centre sociality and the privacy-centered sociality. Finally, the study also provides some suggestions to improve network resources organizations, and gives the consultations for professionals in library information and network information services industry.