Then each went to his own home

Statistics is a broad mathematical discipline which studies ways to collect, summarize and draw conclusions from data. [Wikipedia]

Statistics help us to draw conclusions from data. In a way this whole tagging thing just popped up and now we are trying to figure out what really is happening. I think statistics can help us to understand tags.

When I did set up my performance test system I wanted to know the metrics of delicious so I did try to extrapolate some hand collected data but it didn’t turn out that well.

After that I started collecting post data from del.icio.us and am happy to announce that I’ve set up a site with delicious statistics that is fully automated (my hands can rest now..). There are trends about number of posts per day as well as numbers of tags per post.
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When you tag an item, for instance a bookmark, you give them different tags, for instance I tagged the bookmark for “How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily” (you know this link if you give attention to delicious popular.. :-)) with

“writing”, “toread”, “productivity”, “language”

Now what instantially pops into my mind is, that the tag “toread” is quite different from the other tags. In fact it is something I want to do with this bookmark further on. I name this type of tag “adjective” (I will come back to that name later on..). The other tags I consider as “categories“.
Now you’ll probably say “ah, this is a rare exception”. This is not true. I often tag items with “blog” because it happens that the interesting page I found about my favourite hobby happens to be a blog. Therefore I named this type of tag as “adjective” as it is rather a description to the item than it is a category to it.
Other tags used often as adjectives are “reference”, “tutorial”, “fun”, “cool”, “news”, “free”..
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Once upon a time I asked a question on the del.icio.us mailing list if Joshua could give me some stats of his bookmark webservice.
He didn’t. And so I thought I’d do some extrapolation to gain some stats.
And eventually you help me thinking so we together could have some collaborative stats. (more…)