What are tags?

What are tags?

By the Ourmedia staff

Tags are keywords that you attach to your media files, postings or membership profile. Many sites let you assign keywords to a piece of media when you publish it.

Why are they important?

In the old days, you could find what you were looking for only through subject hierarchies created by experts. Tags are a new grassroots, bottom-up social phenomenon to create organization around social media. When you tag your work, you’re doing more than labeling it; you’re engaging in a democratic, social act that instantly allows other people to find your work without an intermediary. Tags are cool.

What’s the best way to use tags?

Any work of media calls out for words or phrases that capture its essence. People move through information on the Web in different ways. You can think of tags as subjects, themes, related items, channels, search terms, or something else altogether.

Is there one kind of tag that works across all services?

Not yet. Many people use Technorati or del.icio.us to tag their posts or discover posts by others. Flickr is a popular photo-sharing service that relies heavily on tagging.

Also see: Wikipedia’s entry on Folksonomy

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