Collaborative tagging, also known as social tagging or folksonomy, allows users to apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. It has been argued that these tagging systems can provide navigational cues or "way-finders" for other users to explore information.[1][2] The notion is that given that social tags are labels users create to represent topics extracted from online documents, the interpretation of these tags should allow other users to predict the contents of different documents efficiently. Social tags are arguably more important in exploratory search, in which the users may engage in iterative cycles of goal refinement and exploration of new information (as opposed to simple fact-retrievals), and interpretation of information contents by others will provide useful cues for people to discover topics that are relevant.
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents.[1][2] Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and "tagging". Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, allowing users to organize their bookmarks and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies.
Optimizing web search using social annotations
This paper is concerned with the problem of browsing social annotations. Today, a lot of services (e.g., Del.icio.us, Filckr) have been provided for helping users to manage and share their favorite URLs and photos based on social annotations. Due to the ...
What Happened to Tagging? - JSTOR Daily
Tags decentralized and democratized the organization of information. What became of "social tagging?"
Home
TAGS is a free Google Sheet template which lets you setup and run automated collection of search results from Twitter.
From Social Network to Sense Making
Collective Social | Track what you love. Share what matters.
Curate lists, track your progress, and share recommendations across books, movies, TV shows, and more — all on the open social web.
Beyond the hashtag: Circumventing content moderation on social media
Social media companies make important decisions about what counts as “problematic” content and how they will remove it. Some choose to moderate hashtags, blocking the results for certain tag searches and issuing public service announcements (PSAs) when users search for troubling terms. The hashtag has thus become an indicator of where problematic content can be found, but this has produced limited understandings of how such content actually circulates. Using pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) communities as a case study, this article explores the practices of circumventing hashtag moderation in online pro-ED communities. It shows how (1) untagged pro-ED content can be found without using the hashtag as a search mechanism; (2) users are evading hashtag and other forms of platform policing, devising signals to identify themselves as “pro-ED”; and (3) platforms’ recommendation systems recirculate pro-ED content, revealing the limitations of hashtag logics in social media content moderation.
BridgEU: new project to study how recommendation systems can reduce polarization | SynoSys
A new collaborative project with Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Eurosky, and SPRIND explores whether social media recommendation algorithms can strengthen public discourse instead of reinforcing divisions.
Paper Skygest: Personalized Academic Recommendations on Bluesky
We build, deploy, and evaluate Paper Skygest, a custom personalized social feed for scientific content posted by a user's network on Bluesky and the AT Protocol. We leverage a new capability on emerging decentralized social media platforms: the ability for anyone to build and deploy feeds for other users, to use just as they would a native platform-built feed. To our knowledge, Paper Skygest is the first and largest such continuously deployed personalized social media feed by academics, with over 50,000 weekly uses by over 1,000 daily active users, all organically acquired. First, we quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate Paper Skygest usage, showing that it has sustained usage and satisfies users; we further show adoption of Paper Skygest increases a user's interactions with posts about research, and how interaction rates change as a function of post order. Second, we share our full code and describe our system architecture, to support other academics in building and deploying such feeds sustainably. Third, we overview the potential of custom feeds such as Paper Skygest for studying algorithm designs, building for user agency, and running recommender system experiments with organic users without partnering with a centralized platform.
Information foraging
Information foraging is a theory that applies the ideas from optimal foraging theory to understand how human users search for information. The theory is based on the assumption that, when searching for information, humans use "built-in" foraging mechanisms that evolved to help our animal ancestors find food. Importantly, a better understanding of human search behavior can improve the usability of websites or any other user interface.
Collective knowledge foraging in trail-based social networks beyond feeds
Sharing insights about moving beyond feeds from building Semble, a community knowledge garden built on the AT Protocol. The World Wide Web is called a web for good reason. We navigate this web of interconnected websites by clicking hyperlinks and opening new tabs in tools called browsers. This kind of browsing experience is defined by its open-endedness and interwoveness; every website we visit becomes a step along a path. With the rise of social media, we lost touch with this vast trail network. Rather than creating a social web where our trails got woven onto a shared map, they were instead paved over by information superhighways: the algorithmic feeds. Hyper-scaled social media platforms reduced the vast web of interconnected pages into a stripped down ad-ridden and attention-extracting monoculture. Our online experiences became reduced to the flick of a finger, the doom scroll. With the rise of open social protocols, like ATProto, we have an opportunity to leave these misaligned profit-driven and ad-based feeds behind and rediscover the magic of shared knowledge trails. what might that look like? In this lightning talk I’ll share insights and lessons my team and I have learned from building [Semble](https://semble.so/), a community knowledge garden built on ATProto. Semble is an open social network based on knowledge trails rather than feeds. I’ll explore what trail-based social networks of the future could look like, grounded in features and use-cases we’ve uncovered while building Semble. In the transition from feeds back to trails, we aim to co-create an open social web that centres the value of human attention and sparks a new era of collective wisdom. This lightning talk is an invitation to co-create this future together. It will similar to a prior [lightning talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptOMKK1lC4Q) we gave at ATmosphereConf 2026, adapted for DWeb Camp. Recorded at DWeb Camp 2026, Open Social Space, 2026-07-10. Schedule entry: https://talx.dod.ngo/dwebcamp-2026/talk/TA3NY7/
Paper Notes - WTF - The Who to Follow Service at Twitter
Explore Twitter's recommendation system - in-memory graph processing with Cassovary, random walks, and SALSA for user suggestions.
Bonsai: Intentional and Personalized Social Media Feeds
Social media feeds use predictive models to maximize engagement, often misaligning how people consume content with how they wish to. We introduce Bonsai, a system that enables people to build personalized and intentional feeds. Bonsai implements a platform-agnostic framework comprising Planning, Sourcing, Curating, and Ranking modules. This framework allows users to express their intent in natural language and exert fine-grained control over a procedurally transparent feed creation process. We evaluated the system with 15 Bluesky users in a two-phase, multi-week study. We find that participants successfully used our system to discover new content, filter out irrelevant or toxic posts, and disentangle engagement from intent, but curating intentional feeds required more effort than they are used to. Simultaneously, users sought system transparency mechanisms to effectively use (and trust) intentional, personalized feeds. Overall, our work highlights intentional feedbuilding as a viable path beyond engagement-based optimization.
this is what I am *TALKING* about. I'm sure I'm late but this is such a cool idea from @semble.so. Collections are not new but mapping the specific kind of relationship between two things?? And this is publicly usable shared knowledge? Social knowledge as a service, beautiful.
taurean
to be fair we are also getting that from projects, I am just greedy and want to see even more. For example with @germnetwork.com, E2EE messaging is not new but multiple sub-identities in one inbox is. Show us something weird and new if/when you adopt an existing experience but for atproto.
Social media algorithms don't allow us to understand or control what we see online and why... until now! Top scholars @jonathanstray.com and @noupside.bsky.social are sharing @mysky.social, a tool that allows users to adjust their feed’s priorities and explains why certain posts appear over others.
🎛️📲 Meet the algorithm you can actually control and understand
newpublic.substack.comsensemaking on social media
examples of useful sensemaking happening on social media
fray — Bluesky thread factions
samantha.wiki/fray
Mu for democracy - Erlend’s notes
social-protocols/jabble
Dan Singleton 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ on Twitter / X
No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior
