Tagging 101

I'm Sean Morton, Community Manager for TechRepublic, and today I'd like to talk about tagging. Over the past year tagging has become one of the hottest topics on the Internet. I'd like to explain what tagging is and why it's become so popular.

First lets start by defining what a tag is. A tag is basically a key word that's added to a piece of content to allow people to know more about it. An example you can use for this is a photograph, lets say you've gone to Florida, and you went sailing and you took some photographs. You can upload these photos to a site like Flickr and add tags like Florida, sailing and maybe even 2005. What this does is it allows others to view this photograph to understand, where it was taken, what you were doing and it was taken this year. Photos aren't the only things that can be tagged, other examples include articles, downloads, even discussion threads.

One of the reasons why tagging has become so popular is context. We'll use the example of a discussion thread to show what I'm talking about. Lets say you're having trouble with one of your servers so you start a discussion thread. You need help with the DNS issue. Before tagging, that was really all the information a user would have to determine how relevant your thread was. With tags, you can actually add descriptive key words such as windows XP, DNS or Caching and this will help other web site visitors understand what your threads all about.

The second reason tagging has become so popular is because it provides new ways to organize content. Before tags, the discussion thread we started will probably live in a single category like networking. This may or may not be the best place for that thread, however on most web sites you can't change the category structures. However with tags, you're actually creating new categories with every tag that you add. So users that come to the website and are looking for threads on Windows XP, or DNS, or Caching, will find your thread because you've tagged them with all three.

The third reason and I think the most powerful that tagging has become so popular is aggregation. Tagging allows you to take content of different types and bring them together even when their underlying category structures don't match up. For example, on TechRepublic we have discussion threads, blog posts, member profiles and bookmarks that our members create. Before tags, a user would have to go to four different places to find the information they're looking for, let's say on a tag like DNS. However with tagging, what we've been able to do is bring these four different types of content together simply by adding the tag DNS to all those content types.

So whether you're tagging your family photographs or you're trying to solve a business problem, tags give you context, new ways to organize, and they allow you to bring together content of different types.