Pecman is an experiment (test) in user tagging of web resources. The experimental setup is that the test person fills out a small form of Internet- and computer experience and of experience with tagging as well as age, sex and email.

Then the test person browse a website, returns to the main-website, and ad tags categorizing the website in question. This proceeds for all the websites included in the test (11 sites). I skipped the last 7 - it got a bit tiresome.

The aim of tagging is explained as “…aim of tag systems is to store and organize content for later retrieval”. This does not correspond with my more broad definition. But thats because I either uses the prefix social or collaborative with -tagging. Thus focusing on the social aspect of tagging and folksonomy-systems.

I would like to know more about the test. More about exactly what are under the microscope in the test ?-) I don’t think that this test show much about tagging as such, the test shows how different users perception of the website in question are in this experimental context. I look forward to see documentation of the experiment. Personally I would have supplied the test persons with an simulated work task, as described in Borlund (2000). This gives test persons a contextual background for conducting a test and applying relevance assessments.

The experiment is conducted by Gerrit Vos and Dirk Bollen from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Centre for Usability Research and are part of the research project Personal Content Management Platform (PeCMan).

All in all and as I said, I look forward to the documentation of the test

References
Borlund, P. (2000). Experimental components for the evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems In: Journal of Documentation. 56 (1). p. 71 - 90.