This article describes and analyses three academic social bookmarking tools and two bibliographic management systems as to their objective and subjective features. A metadata scheme was thoroughly examined as a support for infometric studies. It also presents an overall view of motivational aspects and potential discursive zones that can derivate from keyword tagging analysis.The final argument speculates about other relations found through the tagging assignment process that could disclose common language functions as well as unveil characteristics of discursive communities regarding virtual collaborative environments.