I'm Sean Morton, Community Manager for TechRepublic, andtoday I'd like to talk about tagging. Over the past year tagging has become oneof the hottest topics on the Internet. I'd like to explain what tagging is andwhy it's become so popular.
First lets start by defining what a tag is. A tag isbasically a key word that's added to a piece of content to allow people to knowmore about it. An example you can use for this is a photograph, lets say you'vegone to Florida, and you went sailing and you took some photographs. You canupload these photos to a site like Flickr and add tags like Florida, sailingand maybe even 2005. What this does is it allows others to view this photographto understand, where it was taken, what you were doing and it was taken thisyear. Photos aren't the only things that can be tagged, other examples includearticles, downloads, even discussion threads.
One of the reasons why tagging has become so popular iscontext. We'll use the example of a discussion thread to show what I'm talkingabout. Lets say you're having trouble with one of your servers so you start adiscussion thread. You need help with the DNS issue. Before tagging, that wasreally all the information a user would have to determine how relevant yourthread was. With tags, you can actually add descriptive key words such aswindows XP, DNS or Caching and this will help other web site visitorsunderstand what your threads all about.
The second reason tagging has become so popular is becauseit provides new ways to organize content. Before tags, the discussion thread westarted will probably live in a single category like networking. This may ormay not be the best place for that thread, however on most web sites you can'tchange the category structures. However with tags, you're actually creating newcategories with every tag that you add. So users that come to the website andare looking for threads on Windows XP, or DNS, or Caching, will find yourthread because you've tagged them with all three.
The third reason and I think the most powerful that tagginghas become so popular is aggregation. Tagging allows you to take content ofdifferent types and bring them together even when their underlying categorystructures don't match up. For example, on TechRepublic we have discussionthreads, blog posts, member profiles and bookmarks that our members create.Before tags, a user would have to go to four different places to find theinformation they're looking for, let's say on a tag like DNS. However withtagging, what we've been able to do is bring these four different types ofcontent together simply by adding the tag DNS to all those content types.
So whether you're tagging your family photographs or you'retrying to solve a business problem, tags give you context, new ways toorganize, and they allow you to bring together content of different types.
