Tagging

A blog post and a news story about 'tagging'--

From CNN:

Here's how we tend to organize our digital photos: We stick them into a folder on our computer and label it "Hawaii trip," or whatever.
Here's a new way: Forget folders or albums. Just "tag" the photos based on what's actually in each frame.
Now, extrapolate this concept to the ideas, images, videos -- and people -- you meet or wish to find online. If they're properly tagged, they're far easier to find.
That's "tagging", and it's currently all the rage among the digerati.
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....

And from "Tagsonomy (a blog about tagging":

The real zinger for me was realizing that tagging or folksonomy is yet another manifestation of our evolution from hierarchical systems to more later, emergent, and empowering network/grassroots approaches. Here we’re talking about a populist approach to taxonomy: rather than fit our thinking into authoritative closed classification schemes, we can create our own through tagging, and in social tagging environments we can negotiate new, more nuanced ways to map meaning and relationship through shared, emergent classification systems.

It’s odd to be so excited about these little chunks of metadata. The concept of tagging, and the way the concept’s been applied so far, are deceptively simple. On the one hand, I can’t believe we weren’t doing this years ago; on the other hand, I have to admit that I didn’t get the value of tags when I first used del.icio.us. What’s the value of an ephemeral label, I wondered, a category I’ve dreamed up for my own use? I was misunderestimating my ability to build systems of organization that are simple and effective, and I wasn’t thinking about the value of “gardening,” as we do with wikis where architecture is not enforced by the technology....

To see how tagging in action, see Technorati, which lets you search for blog posts based on tags, del.icio.us, which lets you search for user-bookmarked sites based on tags, or Flickr, which lets you search for user-uploaded photos based on tags.