Tagging and the many ways it appears on the web

Tagging is a way of organising things you need to find on the internet. Today I will look at three different websites and how they all use tagging in different ways.

The first website is facebook. On facebook tags are put on pictures and videos. If a friend uploads a picture of your rugby team he could then tag all the people who have facebook on the rugby team in the photo. That photo would then be sent to the members of the rugby team's collective photo album. This is an album which every facebook member has. The album contains all the photos that that person has been tagged in. Underneath the super album are links to albums that that person has uploaded which may not have pictures of them in necessarily but might have pictures of their friends in them which they have tagged them in. So what are the advantages of this, well firstly it is an easy way of sharing photos with your friends who live on the other side of the world and who would not be able to see the photos in hard copy in your living room. It is also becoming a new way to find old friends. People are uploading their school pictures from years ago then tag a couple of people who they have kept in touch with in the photo, then some of those people will tag a few more people that they have kept in touch with but the original up loader may have lost contact with. Eventually you may find that half the people in the photo are on facebook and that they are now back in contact with each other as after seeing old friends tagged in the photo they have added them as a friend. Of course there are some disadvantages to tagging on facebook, you may be tagged at a party doing something that you would not like other people see, but because of the tag all your friends can see you in this photo, this can lead to trouble with employers, school, and your family, however the way around this is to untag yourself from the photo or to just be careful what you are photographed doing.

The second website that uses tags to a great extent is Flickr. Flickr as I have described in previous posts is a social networking site which specialises in sharing photos, so how does it use tags. Well you can upload photos like with facebook and then arrange them into albums for example, "Holiday to America". You can then tag different things in each photo for example in a photo of the Grand Canyon with your uncle in it; you could tag Grand Canyon and Uncle. Then depending on the privacy settings of the photo you have uploaded, these tags will be placed in a sort of super album where if anyone searched grand canyon then your photo would come up along with anyone else's photos which had Grand Canyon tagged in one of their pictures, that is if you had your privacy settings like that. Why is this useful? Well again like facebook it helps you show family and friends on the other side of the world what you have been up to and also helps you find friends you have lost, for example like with facebook the snowball effect could occur if you add a school picture and then everyone tags different people. However Flickr takes tagging a step further than facebook. Flickr is now being used like a Google images search tool bar, when students are doing projects for example on the rainforest and need pictures, not only will they search on Google images but also on Flickr now as there are bound to some good rainforest pictures in the 3 billion photos that Flickr has.

The final website that uses tags is one called Delicious. This is an extremely useful website that allows you to save tags on the internet. How it works is you sign up for an account then in the option that says save url you copy and paste your favourite websites url then you leave a description to remind what the website does then you tag it for example if you were to add facebook you could tag the site social networking, friends and favourite website. Then when you come back in a year’s time and you have 100 different tags it is easy to find your different websites and remember what each website does and why you needed it. You can also share your delicious bookmarks with your friends which can become useful in business. Below is a very good video describing delicious and its advantages. The other video describes tagging on a more general scale and compares it to the old way of book marking websites with folders.
If you want to find out more about the history of any of these sites then simply follow the hyperlinks in the blog.