It’s a Tag World, My Masters
Exactly how useful are tags?
Tags and tagging are a big part of the Web 2.0 ethos. Instead of sorting items into folders, you describe them with a series of words. The words you use, the ‘tags’, are up to you. Some people refer to this as ‘folksonomy’ in the sense that tags are home-grown and created by users, as opposed to putting things into folders in a tree structure decided by other people, ‘taxonomy’.
This can be useful for lots of reasons. Some of these are obvious:
The same item can be tagged with several terms. This post, for example, is about tags, but it’s also about web 2.0, del.icio.us, YouTube and flickr. It then occupies several locations in your filing system, and can thus be found in several different ways.
If you decide to bookmark it to del.icio.us or similar, then it’s up to you to decide how might you want to classify it. Your filing system comes to match your way of classifying things rather than one imposed by another person.
If your existing mental filing system can’t fit a new item, then you can simply invent new terms to accommodate it.
Multimedia, in particular, is very hard to classify using other means. The recently launched Google image labeler game challenges pairs of users to find matching descriptive words for pictures. The matching words are, of course, the tags that best describe the picture.
The big criticism of tagging is that it doesn’t work for finding things unless you think the same way as the person who tagged the item in the first place. If idiots do the tagging (viz. people who don’t think the same as me), then I’ll never find the item.
