Tags to the World

By Eric Holter, June 2008

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Tags to the World

»	What is a Tag?
2.	Why Use Tags?
3.	Creating Tags
4.	Tag Categories
5.	Benefits of Tagging
6.	Other Tagging Platforms

My first encounter with tagging was on Flickr. I discovered Flickr a few years ago when a colleague and I were chatting about emerging "Web 2.0" websites. He thought Flickr's photo sharing interface was a classic example. On Flickr people add descriptive "tags" to their photos. Two people walking on a beach might be tagged: beach, ocean, john, jane, sand, water, vacation, happy, and blue. At first I was bewildered. Tags seemed so disorganized, unstructured, and random. I didn't understand why people bothered adding tags. How did they hope to use them?

Today I'm a tagging junkie. I primarily tag blog posts and web pages. What may seem like a primitive, even pointless personal filing system is becoming the "connective tissue" of the entire web.

Tags help manage information, but that's just the beginning. They also enable collaboration, create opportunities for discovery, extend value through sharing, and I believe will impact the future of search.

If you've taken my advice to begin subscribing to blogs via RSS, adding tagging to your web 2.0 tool box is critical next step.

I currently subscribe to 130 RSS feeds which deliver over 200 posts a day to my reader. For most of these posts I merely skim the title and move on. Others get a cursory scan of their content. And a few get read in their entirety. In the past, whenever I found a helpful website I'd bookmark or "favorite" it in my browser. But today, with the quantity of information I have to contend with, my browser's bookmarking tools are inadequate. (Well, maybe the new bookmarking system in Firefox 3 could handle it, but there are other reasons why I feel that a browser isn't the ideal place for my bookmarks). Besides, importing and exporting bookmarks when I upgrade or switch browsers is a pain.

Rather than relying on my browser's bookmarks I use a site called del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is basically an online alternative to browser-based bookmarks. next >

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Comments

claranne	December 10, 2008 11:20 AM I am invdstigating ways to index an electronic newsletter I am invovled with. We need to archive some of the articles and make it searchable. Would tagging work for that activity? How would it work? claranne.vogel@dese.mo.gov
Chris	December 10, 2008 11:22 AM Claranne, Tagging probably wouldn't do the trick. Tagging would be helpful for organizing this content by concepts or categories, and using something like Del.icio.us, you could let other people see it if they have common tags. Is this content already part of a website that you maintain? Chris