Tagging: the next, next big thing
'Tags' Ease Sifting of Digital Data - Yahoo! News: "Tagging has the potential to change how we keep track of and discover things digital � even whom we meet online. Several startups are banking their futures on it...Though many Web sites have long embedded search keywords, or metadata, tagging has a social component that gives it its power..."
"Tagging is something selfishly useful. It helps you understand and categorize something for yourself," Technorati founder David Sifry said. "But I can take advantage of the fact that you and hundreds and thousands of people have also tagged the things" for themselves.
Tagging is fundamentally about tapping the collective human wisdom, rather than relying on a computer algorithm, for search, said Ben Shneiderman, who teaches human-computer interaction at the University of Maryland.....
Examples: ...Entire communities have formed around tagging.Nearly 2,000 Flickr users are part of a "squared circle" group, all sharing a desire to crop into squares photographs of circular objects. Other users tag satellite images of their childhood neighborhood "memorymaps" and annotate them with stories about growing up.
At 43 Things, where visitors list their goals, those inspired by the book "Getting Things Done" have tagged their goals "GTD." The tag helps users find what like-minded people want to accomplish and perhaps adopt those goals, too.
Conference-goers are frequent taggers. Organizers of a blogging conference in Paris last week encouraged participants to tag their entries "lesblogs." Italian blogger Luca Lizzeri did just that and got hundreds of additional visitors.
Sites like Technorati not only let you search its own indexes, but also pull items from other sites. So a search for "tsunami" brings together Flickr photos and del.icio.us links besides blog entries — creating a mini-magazine of sorts on the fly.
Cons: ...drawback lacks an easy solution, though. Once tagging takes off, marketers are bound to add irrelevant tags to hijack you to the latest Viagra ad.
Warns Danny Sullivan, editor of the online newsletter Search Engine Watch: "The noise and deliberate manipulation will probably just bring the system into a crashing halt."
posted by Jen @ 7:08 am
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