History and Context
Labeling and tagging are carried out to perform functions such as aiding in classification, marking ownership, noting boundaries, and indicating online identity. They may take the form of words, images, or other identifying marks. An analogous example of tags in the physical world is museum object tagging. In the organization of information and objects, the use of textual keywords as part of identification and classification long predates computers. However, computer based searching made the use of keywords a rapid way of exploring records.
Online and Internet databases and early websites deployed them as a way for publishers to help users find content. In 2003, the social bookmarking website Delicious provided a way for its users to add "tags" to their bookmarks (as a way to help find them later); Delicious also provided browseable aggregated views of the bookmarks of all users featuring a particular tag. Flickr allowed its users to add their own text tags to each of their pictures, constructing flexible and easy metadata that made the pictures highly searchable. The success of Flickr and the influence of Delicious popularized the concept, and other social software websites – such as YouTube, Technorati, and Last.fm – also implemented tagging. "Labels" in Gmail are similar to tags.
Tagging has gained wide popularity due to the growth of social networking, photography sharing and bookmarking sites. These sites allow users to create and manage labels (or “tags”) that categorize content using simple keywords. The use of keywords as part of an identification and classification system long predates computers. In the early days of the web keywords meta tags were used by web page designers to tell search engines what the web page was about. Today's tagging takes the meta keywords concept and re-uses it. The users add the tags. The tags are clearly visible, and are themselves links to other items that share that keyword tag.
The social bookmarking site Delicious, in 2003, provided a way for its users to add "tags" to their bookmarks that enabled them to share webpages with other users and to search based on the particular tags. Flickr allowed its users to add free-form tags to each of their pictures, enabling a bottom-up user driven approach that made the pictures easily discoverable. The success of Flickr and the influence of Delicious popularized the concept, and other social software websites – such as YouTube, Technorati, and StumbleUpon – also implemented tagging. Most media player programs, such as iTunes or Winamp, allow users to manually add and edit tags.
Knowledge tags are an extension of keyword tags. They were first used by Jumper 2.0, an open source Web 2.0 software platform released by Jumper Networks on 29 September 2008. Jumper 2.0 was the first collaborative search engine platform to use a method of expanded tagging for knowledge capture.
Websites that include tags often display collections of tags as tag clouds. A user's tags are useful both to them and to the larger community of the website's users.
Tags may be a "bottom-up" type of classification, compared to hierarchies, which are "top-down". In a traditional hierarchical system (taxonomy), the designer sets out a limited number of terms to use for classification, and there is one correct way to classify each item. In a tagging system, there are an unlimited number of ways to classify an item, and there is no "wrong" choice. Instead of belonging to one category, an item may have several different tags. Some researchers and applications have experimented with combining structured hierarchy and "flat" tagging to aid in information retrieval.
Read more about this topic: Tag (metadata)
Famous quotes containing the words history and, history and/or context:
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)