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Web 2.0 Basics – Tags

With the Web 2.0 came a new way to organise your information, Tags.  In the pre-tag world, data was typically only organised based upon one of its characteristics.  This was akin to cataloging where, an article would belong to one and only one category.  You can compare this to a library.  If, say, you wanted a book on Spain you would look under travel.  Within travel you would find all the books covering every country in world.  Yes, they may be arranged alphabetically (by author or title depending on where you go) but thats still a bit hit and miss.  The other possibility is that a book on Spain could be in a “Spain” category.  Now that would allow you find the book fairly quickly once you got to the Spain section as there would only be a small number of books in there.  Unfortunately, there would be so many categories, it would be difficult to find the right one.  Almost returning us to square one.

So in steps Tags.  Tags allow you to categorise information in multiple different ways.  Taking our book on Spain as an example, we could tag it with Spain, Travel, Europe and anything else that is relevant.  Searching for this book using tags then becomes much easier.  You constantly narrow down your results with each tag you add to your search/filter criteria.

One of the key drivers of Tagging in the Web 2.0 world is a phenomenon known as folksonomy.  Folksonomy is where tags are assigned by the consumers of the information as opposed to the creators.  Traditionally, especially on the internet, there was a clear distinction between the content creators and the content consumers.  This line is increasingly blurring and folksonomy, and tagging, is key to that.

This post was written on Tuesday, January 30th 2007 by Simon T and has been categorised under Web 2.0 , Web 2.0 Basics. The trackback URL is here or you could add a response. If you really want to you can Digg Story or add it to del.icio.us, Technorati Cosmos, Blinklist, furl or Reddit.

2 Responses to “Web 2.0 Basics – Tags”

  1. Jonathan Says:

    April 12th, 2007 at 9:12 pm

    So how do I implement tags on my site? Do I have to use blogging software or can I use tags even when I have a standard site?

  2. Simon T Says:

    April 26th, 2007 at 12:17 am

    Hi Jonathan. Its certainly easier if you use software that is already configured to handle tags. Wordpress, which this blog runs on does support tagging but is far from ideal. There are other services, such as del.icio.us, that handle tags much better.

    It wouldn’t be difficult to implement them using your own software, but you’d have to make the decision right at the start so your database design can take it. To get a bit teccy, the relationship between items and tags would be one item to many tags whereas previously it was one article to one category.

    Hope that helps.

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