Abstract
Recently, users publish their comments, diaries and photos on the web services such as weblogs and photo sharing services. In these cases, it is common to manage those contents by tagging some keywords for classifying their characteristics. In this paper, we defined those manual annotations by users that include subjective information such as feelings and intentions, as “subjective annotation”. Currently, linguistically expressed subjective annotation, typified by collaborative tagging has come into widespread use. However, it is difficult to express some feelings by linguistically expressed annotation. Therefore, we proposed the use of avatars as a means of nonverbal expression of subjectivity, and confirmed the consistency of feelings elicited by avatars in two cases; over time for an individual and in a group. In addition, we compared the expressiveness and ease of subjective annotation between collaborative tagging and avatars. The result indicated that the feelings evoked by avatars are consistent in both cases, and using controllable avatars is easier than collaborative tagging for representing feelings elicited by contents that do not express meaning, such as photos.
