Abstract:
This study describes how user-generated metadata may be leveraged to enhance findability in web-based social software applications (Morville, 2005). Two interaction design systems, content tagging (Golder & Huberman, 2005) and recommender systems (Resnick & Varian, 1997), are examined to identify strengths and weaknesses along three findability factors: information classification, information retrieval and information discovery. Greater overall findability strength may be found in content tagging systems than in recommender systems.