archive.Joe Lamantia.com

A posting from China Web2.0 Review shared results of a report on Chinese tagging rates released by Baidu, China’s leading search engine.

I was not able to locate a translation of the original report from Baidu, so I’ll quote the summary from China Web2.0 Review:

According to the report, only 2.3% of internet users have ever used tag, they mainly use tags in social bookmarking and blogs. I don’t know the methods of data collection, but the report said about 15 million Chinese webpages were bookmarked by users, on average each user has saved 40 online bookmarks. Among them, over 90% users add less than two tags for a bookmark.

And based on the tags of user saved bookmarks, the most used tags are “software download”, “BBS”, “entertainment”, “game” and “learning”.

We don’t know which services are included for analysis in the report, so I have no idea to which extent I can trust it. But based on my observation, I agree with the basic finding of the report, even though more and more services have embodied tagging feature, only a very small part of early-adopters in China indeed use it.

Two things come to mind right away:

Still, even with the absence of solid qualifying, corroborating, or contextual information, this rate of adoption for tagging seems consistent with the rest of the very rapid pace of modernization in China.

And as the First Principle of Tag Clouds – “Where there’s tags, there’s a tag cloud” – says, this means there are quite a few tag clouds on the way in China.