Examining social tagging behaviour and the construction of an online folksonomy from the perspectives of cultural capital and social capital

This study explores the relationships between cultural and social capital and online social tagging behaviour in Delicious.com, a social bookmarking web site that offers social tagging functionalities. Based on Bourdieu’s conception of cultural and social capital, an online questionnaire was developed to measure Delicious users’ capital possession and its influences on social tagging behavioural tendencies. The study findings showed that the offline/online cultural capital and offline social capital affected information organization-oriented tagging; offline/online social capital affected social oriented-tagging; offline/online cultural capital and offline/online social capital both affected strategic tagging; offline/online social capital affected tagging imitation. Based on the findings, we made inferences on the user roles and the power structure of a social tagging folksonomy community.