Keyword tagging as a social organizational tool
Tuesday, February 8th, 2005
Salon has a great article on the use of keywords (tagging) to make finding things and collecting things into groups interesting and easier: Steal this bookmark!
Like the old meta tags that many websites put in their index files so that search-bots would pick them up and index them with those keywords (adding the word “sex” to a site that is not sex-related will bring more eyeballs), keyword tagging of images on Flickr and bookmarks on del.icio.us has proven popular and effective.
If you think of it as an organizational technique that allows you to find things more easily (show me all pictures with “beards”) but also allows others to find your pictures with “beards” you’re getting the idea. The idea is that as more people share the same organizational schemas and they overlap, new kinds of social interactions are possible.