Tagging advantages

A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (like picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information it is applied to.

Source: Wikipedia
These days every second web site uses tagging to organize their content. It is actually an extremely simple concept and has been around for ages, its just that nobody really saw the value in it until now!

How does tagging work?
Lets have a look at http://www.go2sa.co.za Lets suppose you are a member of the community and you are writing an article on a nature trail of about 3 miles to a waterfall. “Old” web sites will have a web master sitting behind a computer and he will submit a bunch of predetermined categories to which you can submit your article. In the context of your article, the webmaster gave you 2 choices for your article about your nature walk namely “Hikes and Trails” and “Nature Walks”. So you choose to submit your article to “Nature Walks”. But wait a minute… What about the waterfall?! So you first had to contact the webmaster and ask him very nicely if he could create a category “Waterfalls” so that you can add your article to that category too. Thats to say if the site allows you to save your article to more than one category, as many of the “old” sites do not allow for that!

Along comes tagging! After you have finished writing your article you can sit and decide how you want to categorize your article. You decide you want your article to be categorized under: Nature Walks, Hikes, Trails, Scenic Routes, Waterfall, Bird Life, etc… You basically highlight key issues in your article and use it for tagwords.

Now your article is “linked” to other articles using the same tagwords
as if you would have clicked on a category in an “old” site and a list
of articles would appear.

The benefits
One of the major benefits is that YOU are in control, NOT the webmaster. You can decide what you think is best to find your article.

It makes logically sense. It does not make sense to list your article only under “Nature Walks” as that is only a small part of what your article is about!

It allows for visitors to add tags to your article as they see fit. Let say there is a paragraph of bird watching in your article, but you never included “bird watching” as a tag word, somebody reading your article can add “bird watching” as a tag to your article!

Conclusion
The easiest way to look at tagging is to think of it as keywords to describe your article. You can also see it as creating “categories” on the fly. Very simple concept, but extremely powerful!

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3 Comments to "Tagging advantages"

• stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Using Muti - Tagging said: On 02/12/2007 at 7:19 am

  [...] Tags is single keywords attached to a submission that link to all other submissions that have the same keyword attached to them. So if you read a submission tagged with a specific keyword, you can read similar submissions by clicking the tag word. Read more anout tagging here! [...]

• stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Afrigator - Getting Started said: On 04/17/2007 at 12:05 am

  [...] A couple of things you need to be aware of before you start. If you are not sure what a “tag” or “tag word” is, please read this post first! [...]

• Wynand Engelbrecht said: On 04/18/2007 at 2:24 pm

  Thanx Stii, brilliant idea to take us plebs through the paces, I’m gobbling it up!

Spit it out!

Filed in: Tagging, Web 2.0 by: Stii