Exploring Factors Impacting Users´ Attitude and Intention towards Social Tagging Systems

While recent progress has been made in understanding the structure and dynamics of social tagging systems, we know little about the users´ underlying motivations for tagging, and how these motivations influence the resulting use of tagging systems. In this article, we propose and empirically validate a conceptual model of key factors that affect users´ attitude and intention to use social tagging systems. Our findings highlight three new factors and confirm two previous factors. In addition to Perceived Enjoyment and Perceived Ease-of-use, we introduce Content Generation, Information Retrievability, and Information Re-findability as new dimensions affecting the use of social tagging systems. Our goal is to help researchers, designers, and managers of tagging systems and other social systems on the Web understand how to motivate users to increase their use and hence harvest the collaborative and sharing benefits associated with these tools.