Tagging

Tagging deserves its own post beyond the incredibly handy programs like Del.icio.us.

If you use Web 2.0 sites like Flickr or gmail you are probably tagging. Tagging at its simplest gives individual users a way to organize web-sites and content for their own purposes. If you are a gmail user for example, you can now tag the mail you receive instead of file it. Because you can give a single email multiple tags you can "file" that email under password, conference, and education instead of having to choose just one location. When you need the email again you can find it if you search under any of those terms.

Social web-sites expand this concept. Try visiting http://technorati.com/. Technorati searches and compiles web-content by tag and organizes it so you can search for relevant (maybe) content. I visited this morning and searched on yarn.
The first thing you might notice is that Technorati found almost 58,000 mentions of the word yarn, which might strike you as a little scary. It then gives you links to many of the blogs and videos which mention yarn today. Technorati searchs blogs, but also searches social media - photos, videos, and music. There is a tag cloud on the home page that shows you which tags are most frequently used at that moment.

I was there this morning - Britney Spears is #2 on the list, much scarier than 58,000 hits on yarn (left). Wii is apparently really the hot Christmas present this year - number 7 on the list.

Flickr (the photo sharing site) users also tag their photos. Flickr has a new feature - they take those photos with a geographic tag and organize them on a searcheable map. This essentially organizes tags in a traditional, hierarchical manner for the benefit of users:
It's still not a perfect search tool -- users tag photos with words they will remember, not with words users traditional search on. In my case I wanted a picture of the Black Canyon outside on Montrose, CO. A search on Black Canyon found the one in Idaho (hadn't heard of that one before). I had to search on Montrose to find a picture of the Black Canyon I was interested in.

This is a picture someone named Ken Lund took and posted.






The trouble I had searching for the Black Canyon of the Gunnison brings up a critical issue with tags - they aren't hierarchical or organized in any traditional sense, other than frequency of use. Flickr's use of the map has begun to address this - you can look for North America, then US, then Colorado, a more traditional search path. The taggers though (that's all of us) generally don't have formal training in research methodology, so the accuracy of the tags is .... not necessarily very good.

Tag Clouds shown by sites that utilize tagging and rate media, and thus ideas, by the frequency of the use of a specific tagging term do change the world that we see. Is Brittney Spears really that much more important than Iraq? If your frame of reference is the tag cloud on Technorati she is. Certainly more people are tagging more items with her name than they are with Iraq. Will other critical ideas not get enough tags and so will their tag just shrink in size until they just disappear?

More later.

Lisa