Tagging takes of for web homies
Once again Pew Internet and American Life Project bring up some interesting stats of social networking/web 2.0 arena. According to published article of BBC, tagging or labeling online content gaining popularities as a whole new search tool.
As more and more people put their own content online, they are also being invited to tag it with descriptive keywords to help organise their data.
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the trend in tagging is growing among US web users.
For users like us who uses social networking sites tagging is just an obvious tool to navigate around the sites we visit. But this tagging/ labeling is something more than just easy navigation tool. I am sure you heard about Semantic Web, in which information is machine processable (rather than being only human oriented), thus permitting browsers or other software agents to find, share and combine information. The Social tagging may not be the perfect Semantic Web component like RDF, but sort out data based on supplied keyword within a network. Some of the tagging like-technorati tagging can be even inter network wide. Anyway if we have to talk about future of semantic web and content labeling it will be a long session, so lets just focus on the social tagging.
In simple word, Tagging is a kind of content labeling which makes the content easily searchable and easier to organise information within a network/site. There are different forms of tagging in different network, like flicker got it’s picture tagging, technorati got it’s keyword tagging etc. Currently most of these tagging works only within the network’s data/content, for example with Flicker tagging you can’t expect to find YouTube video. Despite it’s limitation, tagging makes life a lot of easier. Tagging allows social groups to form around similarities of interests and points of view. People using same tag brings up peoples closer to each other who share some common test. No doubt tagging is getting quite a ground among US users, according to research over a quarter of online Americans - 28% - had tagged content such as a photo, news story or blog.
Consider tagging is the doorway to full content labeling.
Tagging, Content Labeling, Semantic Web
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