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"We are discovering that traditional knowledge hierarchies that have served us so well are unnecessarily restricted when it comes to organizing information in the digital world. The principles of organization themselves are changing now that they are being freed from the constraints of the physical world." [1]
What is tagging?
Tagging and linking to things on the Web are organic ways of organizing information different from current categorization schemes that were invented in the offline world (such as the library card catalogue), and these new methods of categorization allow flexibility based on two units: the link, which can point to anything on the Web, and the tag, which is a way of attaching descriptive labels to links.
What are tags?
A tag is like a subject or category. Tags are a simple way to categorize items according to how you think of them, not how some library official does. Anything can be a tag: just type words or phrases and use a dash - between multi-worded tags, for example: home-garden. Attach multiple tags to an item by separating them with commas. Thus, one person will tag an article about journalism: journalism, while another person might assign multiple tags to it: propaganda, press, old-media, and still another only reporting.
Tags are particularly useful for searching and sorting — when you need a list of all articles that deal with a particular topic, for example: podcasts. By simply searching, tagging, and adding tags to your Watchlist, you're creating an organic categorization scheme known as a folksonomy.
What is a Folksonomy?
Folksonomy is a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. It also refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. Wikipedia defines folksonomy as:
A "folksonomy" is a collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enables Internet users to categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. The freely chosen labels -- called tags -- help to improve search engine's effectiveness because content is categorized using a familiar, accessible, and shared vocabulary. The labeling process is called tagging. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and del.icio.us.
But that's not entirely true simply because the keywords being used in tags might not be a shared vocabulary... and that's a positive feature of tagging and folksonomies. It's what makes it an organic form of categorization, in that it is always changing, growing, and evolving in scope and specificity based on the choices people make when assigning tags to items. The resulting tags can be somewhat chaotic in that anyone can use any keyword as a tag, but a folksonomy also has the advantage in that it does become a basis for learning new things, and making user-to-user connections with each other in the world-wide web online community. An example of a web site that makes particularly good usage of tags and aids in those user-to-user connections is Technorati. One of the interesting features on Technorati is their Technorati Tags page, which shows the most popular tags, starting with the ones that are hottest today. The display of Tags is called a Tag Cloud, and it is similar to the one in the illustration above. Clicking on a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.
I've also found an interesting sort of tag search engine, called the Flickr Related Tag Browser, for finding images on Flickr. This could be useful for Newsvine authors who wish to include an image with their posted articles (be sure to check copyright restrictions, if any, before using any images posted at Flickr.) Many of the images at Flickr are available for download and use by the public and, quite often, there are a variety of sizes to choose from.
Additional & Advanced Reading:
- Taxonomies and Tags: From Trees to Piles of Leaves by David Weinberger
- Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags by Clay Shirky
- Steal this bookmark! by Katharine Mieszkowski
