Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

2008 is looking to be the year that researchers start paying attention to social tags in a big way. At the recent AAAI Workshop on Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization and Recommender systems, one third of the talks were devoted to social tagging topics. Oscar tells me that 5 out of the 30 papers at the upcoming RecSys 08 are devoted to social tagging topics.

This year's ISMIR will be no different. There's lots of interesting research around tags and music information retrieval - researchers are looking at filling out the tag cloud (autotagging and tagging games), extracting information from tags (latent semantic methods), cleaning up tags, using tags to assist in training of classifiers, using tags for recommendation, discovery and exploration. There seems to be no end to the interesting things we can do with social tags.

At this year's ISMIR, Elias Pampalk and I will be presenting a tutorial on social tags and music. In the tutorial we will be looking at the state-of-the-art in commercial and research systems that use social tags. I'm rather excited about the tutorial - the topic is just so fascinating to me - and it is great to work with Elias especially with his deep knowledge of the last.fm tagging data (and his new found statistical expertise).

If you are attending ISMIR this year and have an interest in social tags, consider signing up for the tutorial.