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Tagging Article
I just learned about an article titled The next BIG thing: Tagging your Internet searches. It is about tagging and the different tagging sites.
- eweinb04's blog
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Am I missing something?
David Collin
Director of Organizational Learning
American Cancer Society
http://www.fispace.org
Thanks for the article on tagging. But I have to confess...I just don't get it. Of all the things happening under the so-called web 2.0, tagging is the thing that least excites me. It makes sense for pictures I suppose, but I don't see how--in the long run--it is a solution. What happens when there are thousands of tags on millions, maybe billions, of things? Aren't we going to have to have tags for tags? If it gets large enough aren't we just going to end up where we started: a hodgepodge of tags and too much stuff to cope with?
Me, I'm going to hold out for a better search process than Google. I hear there is one search engine out there (in development) that has some real semantic and context capability. At least for things with words, there's a chance a machine will figure out what a document is about and serve it up to me.
Tagging
For me tagging is the way of creating the interconnections between people or organisations who are blogging.
By tagging your blogs in a meaningfull way you enable people to selectively view information. Think of it this way, many organisations provide information on a lot of different areas of interest. If I am looking at your website I may only be interested in one of those areas. For instance if you have a website / blog on cancer - you could have areas of interest topics like social impact, research etc. As a reader of your site I may only be interested in the social impact, so to facilitate my reading and finding information if you create a tag for this topic (and publish what the tag is) I can then selectively read posts on this topic via (for example) a watch list on Technorati.com. This information is then available to me as an RSS feed, and other people who are publishing information on this topic (in there own blog) can also use the same tag.
This means that as the consumer of this published information I can easily view multiple sources, and as I progress from a consumer to a contributor, you will have access to information that I publish. This creates a strong community of interest, and can assist in generating a shared network of information providors.
Hope that helps a little.
ConnectingUp Blog - http://connectingup.cisa.asn.au
My Blog - http://gleesos.wordpress.com
Tagging
For me tagging is the way of creating the interconnections between people or organisations who are blogging.
By tagging your blogs in a meaningfull way you enable people to selectively view information. Think of it this way, many organisations provide information on a lot of different areas of interest. If I am looking at your website I may only be interested in one of those areas. For instance if you have a website / blog on cancer - you could have areas of interest topics like social impact, research etc. As a reader of your site I may only be interested in the social impact, so to facilitate my reading and finding information if you create a tag for this topic (and publish what the tag is) I can then selectively read posts on this topic via (for example) a watch list on Technorati.com. This information is then available to me as an RSS feed, and other people who are publishing information on this topic (in there own blog) can also use the same tag.
This means that as the consumer of this published information I can easily view multiple sources, and as I progress from a consumer to a contributor, you will have access to information that I publish. This creates a strong community of interest, and can assist in generating a shared network of information providors.
Hope that helps a little.
ConnectingUp Blog - http://connectingup.cisa.asn.au
My Blog - http://gleesos.wordpress.com
Good thoughts
Thanks for the explanation. Very helpful.
David Collin
Director of Organizational Learning
American Cancer Society
http://www.fispace.org
related intro to tagging
Readers here might also find useful my recent post 13 Reasons to Use Tags.