Tagging is a term assigned to a piece of information, for example an internet bookmark or digital image. This is a form of metadata. Metadata provides information about a certain item's content. For example, an image may include metadata that describes how large the picture is, the colour depth and when the image was created. A text document's metadata may contain information about how long the document is, who the author is and when the document was written. Tagging is also used as a way to describe data or content therefore acting as a way to locate it via search engines. This is effectively adding a new hierarchy to the way information is organized.
Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system.
Tagging has become increasingly popular as a result of social networking sites, such as Facebook, Digg.com and Flickr. This is because more and more people are putting their own content online.
Websites that include tags often display collections of tags as tag clouds. A user's tags are useful both to them and to the larger community of the website's users.
I believe that tagging is a useful concept because it enables people to navigate themselves round a website quickly. For example with websites such as Facebook you can easily find your friends because they may have been tagged in a picture. It also benefits the internet and internet users because it makes links to other websites easily accessible.
No comments:
Post a Comment