You have been Tagged

Here's my small attempt at explaining what tagging is all about.

In the World Wide Web, we come across plenty and plenty of webpages which give us the information we seek. Humans cant remember the IP addresses of the machines. so we have hostnames. From here comes the URL. To remember the webpages that we visit, we "bookmark" these URLs. Now, since we keep on bookmarking a huge number of webpages, we start clubbing them together into categories.

These categories have a small problem. I can have categories like, "blogs", where i bookmark all the blogs that i often vist and categories like "technical", where i store my bookmarks that link to webpages discussing technical stuff. The problem occurs when we have to bookmark a page which is a mix of both the categories. Like for example, this post of mine. Do you want to bookmark it under "blogs" since its a blog, or under "technical" since it talks about some techy things ?

Most of the times, we end up wasting a lot of time digging through the various categories of the bookmarks to find the link we bookmarked a couple of months ago. We try to decipher the possible webpage the bookmark points to by reading the text that forms the URL. Not the best thing to do, but then thats the only choice we have. This basically boils down to the fact that, just plain categories of bookmarks doesnt help us.

This is where tags come into picture. As you must have tagged a single conversation in gmail with multiple tags since those tags describe the contents of the conversation, in the same manner, when we bookmark a webpage, we can give it tags that would be like some meta-data or "indexes", that would describe the contents of the webpage the bookmark points to. So, the next time you want to dig up a bookmark you saved a couple of months ago, you simply use the tags to "index" through your bookmarks thus increasing your chances of finding the bookmark you were looking for in quite less time than earlier.

Now, if you store your bookmarks on your browser, you have the problem of not being able to use those bookmarks on a machine where you did not save them. If you use a workstation at office and another one at home, you need a mechanism to be able to synchronise the bookmarks on these 2 machines. To solve this, there are websites where you can login and save your bookmarks online. some of these sites provide you the flexibility of storing these bookmarks personally for your use, or you can share them with the public.

Websites like del.icio.us, bring together these 2 thoughts of "sharing bookmarks" and "tagging bookmarks". Once you login and create an account for yourself, you can install a button on your web browser, and everytime you come across a webpage you want to bookmark, you can click on that browser button, and it will save that bookmark into your account. While doing so, you can give this bookmark some tags that would decribe the contents of the webpage. The main intention being to create useful "indexes" that will help you in searching through your own bookmarks at a later point of time.

Things start getting a bit interesting when you start bookmarking and tagging blogs. People write blogs and there are very few ways in which they can publicise their blogs so that more and more people on the World Wide Web can read through their blogs. When you visit an interesting blog which you want to bookmark, more often than not you would give the name of the person who owns the blog as a tag for this bookmark. This is called "tagging the blog". Websites like del.icio.us, have a public list of these bookmarks and tags. People can surf through these tags and thus increase the chances of them visiting your blog. So, tagging of blogs can help you popularise your blog !!! I have already "tagged" the blogs of my friends whom I visit so very often :)

The confusion about tags starts creeping in since lots of blogging sites provide you a feature where you can add tags, or labels to your posts in the blog. There is no easy way of linking these labels with the bookmark tags :(, well atleast for blogspot. Guess, this is another thing just waiting to happen in the near future ...