Tag, You're It!

Tagging, folksonomies, labels, whatever you call it, the driving force behind it is you! Well, you, and me, and everyone else.

Did you notice that when you do a Google search, you get a few good sites, then the rest are useless? This can be a result of the meta-data that is associated with the websites. Meta-data provides the search engines with searchable keywords that the engine can select when returning results.

Tagging is a similar concept. Users are able to tag specific web content with their own keywords. This allows for social ideas about the classification of data.

Another use of tags exists within social networking sites. Users can tag the people that appear in content like pictures, videos, notes and blogs.

In a social networking site such as Facebook, content is only visible to people who are within certain restrictive boundaries (unless a profile is left fully public). So, if I post a picture of Johnny, and he is listed as my friend, then Johnny can see the picture. The only problem is that the rest of Johnny's friends cannot see it.

If I tag Johnny in my picture, then anyone who is in Johnny's network of friends will be able to see the picture. In the same way, if I go to Johnny's profile, I can look at any pictures that are tagged as having him in the image.

So, tagging is a way of generating connections that would otherwise have been unconnected pieces of information. This generates a degree of order in the content on the web. What is interesting about this phenomenon is that the organization is being generated by people. People who are not being paid to do the job. Curious?

Tagging is related to both social bookmarking, and social networking, and it is novel because it allows for user defined (rather than corporate defined) identifiers.

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