If you haven’t heard the term ‘tag‘ used on the internet yet, then you may be missing out on something quite cool! A tag, as I understand it is essentially metadata, or data about data. Ok, let me try and explain it in a less abstract way… Tags are terms that can describe information. For instance on Flickr tags are used to describe photos. A photo of a flower could include the tags: flower, rose, & red. All of these tags would describe the photo, so if I person wanted to find pictures of roses (or any information for that matter) then their metasearch would bring up anything with these tags.
The reason I mention this is twofold. One, is that I think this ‘tagging technology’ is going to shape a lot of future internet development. Tagging allows a way of searching through (and sharing) information in a meaningful way, but instead of doing it with an objective algorithm (like Google) it uses the subjective opinion of users! It is essentially a form of linking versus ranking (It seems likely that the two could be used together to create a linking & ranking system). The second reason I mention it is because I’m going to begin tagging some of my posts, so they are available through tag searches (see Technorati). Here is an example of what they’ll be like:
Tags: tagging metadata technorati
It’s funny how fast things happen. Do you remember this post?
Didn’t rss happen, like, 5 years ago???
Now there is tagging – I’m not sure of the usability of tagging, and delicious. Right now search tagging creates a lot of junk – however, I’m sure it will get better as time goes by – once the tagging is combined with decent searches
Yep, I totally remember that post! Less then a year ago, and I’m not even on the bleeding edge of this stuff…