What is Tagging?
Tagging is the ability to assign topical keywords to a wide range of digital content, like photos, bookmarks (favourite web sites) and blog posts. Here's some of the more interesting things about tags: - Just like the Internet itself, it's self-governing. Nobody's choice of tag is the correct, authoritative tag for a given page or piece of content; everybody gets to choose for herself what word or words will help her find a piece of content again. Finally, information architecture that matches the structure and spirit of the Net!
- Tags are non-hierarchical: unlike the frequently-seen system of nested categories or nested folders (for example, "animals" is a category and "dogs" is a subcategory), tagging treats all topics as equal -- so you can have associations among different tags without having one be "above" the other. In a related point...
- Tags are non-exclusive: you don't have to choose which tag to use. So if you find a great piece of software to connect your Mac and your Treo (to take a hypothetical example) you can tag it "Mac" and "Treo" and "software".
- Tags enable collaboration. The same tag that helps you find that Treo software can help everybody else find it too. Cool, huh?
- Tags make us into better human beings. Really. Because while I'm saving that Treo link it occurs to me that other people might think to look for it under "Palm", so what the hell, I might as well save it with the tag "Palm", too. How generous of me! Aren't I nice person!
But that takes us to the "how" part. Basically the three most obvious ways to use tags are: - To store, retrieve or share favourite web links (bookmarks). del.icio.us was the first service to offer tag-based bookmarking, but there are others.
- To organize, retrieve or share your photos. The big player in the photo-tagging world is Flickr.
- To organize or find blog posts. For now that pretty much relies on using Technorati to aggregate blog posts that share the same tag. For example, you can include the code: <a xhref="http://technorati.com/tag/powerbloghers" rel="tag">powerbloghers</a> to include a post on the Technorati page for powerbloghers.
That last point brings us to the BIG "so what" of tagging: it allows for the distribution and aggregation of content via RSS. If you think of RSS feeds as structured web traffic, then tags are the road signs. Tags tell RSS feeds where to appear on web pages that are structured around RSS -- pages like our Blogher Advanced Tools page. There's no "real" content on that page -- nothing that was posted directly to the blog. There are just a bunch of road signs that say "woohoo! over here!" whenever the tag "powerblogher" passes by in an RSS feed. For more insights into the Meaning of Tags, check out You're It.