The amount of information available on the internet can be overwhelming. The need to organize this information is imperative. It is clearly important when the mission statement of Google is just that.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
When it comes to organization of the information, there are many routes that have been taken. Search engines and internal site searches are used for people to find exactly what they are looking to find. When you have a site with lots of information, one way to help organize it is through tagging. Tagging is an increasingly important way to help organize information. Tags can be created by the user, making them more customizable. Tagging is used in sites which contain blogs, photos (Flickr), social bookmarking (Technorati, del.icio.us), videos (YouTube), music (Last.fm), and even e-mail (Gmail)!
Tagging is essentially choosing keywords to label an item (photo, video, article, music). Flickr is a great example of tagging usage. Flickr is a photo management and sharing application where anyone can upload and share photos. They use a popular form of displaying tags called a tag cloud to show the most popular tags throughout the Flickr site.
A little more about tag clouds…they are showing up all over the place! There is even one on this blog!
A tag cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated tags used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color.
When looking at a tag cloud the size or color of the words coincides with the frequency of the word. A couple more good examples of user-generated tag clouds come from social bookmarking sites Technorati and del.icio.us.
Tagging helps organize information, which makes it easier for users of your site. Users appreciate anything that makes their experience easier! When tagging can be used, it absolutely should be incorporated. Check out TagCrowd to create your own tag cloud or see the tag cloud of any other site you choose! The future of tagging should be interesting to keep an eye on!
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Tags: flickr • Google • Tagging • Technorati • YouTube!
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