STEP 4: Introduction
A tag is a relevant keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (a picture, a geographic map, a blog entry, a video clip etc.), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information. Source: WikipediaTags are read and used by major search engines, social bookmarking and social media sites like Delicious, Flickr, YouTube and even by Gmail to easily categorize, find and aggregate similar content without limiting the user to a pre-determined set of rigid categories.
A tag cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated tags used typically to describe the content of web sites. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag like this example.
Discovery Exercise:
1. View this video to further understand tagging: Video
2. Optional: Read this article about "Tags" and What is "Tagging"?
3. Look at some tagging examples:
Tag clouds gallery
Tag Cloud of University Home Pages
New Tagging Tool at University of Michigan Library
Early and popular examples of sites that use Tags are:
Delicious
Flickr
Gmail - A webmail site that was one of the first to allow categorization of objects using tags, known as "labels" on emails.
4. Post a comment in the comment area below about your experiences or thoughts about tags, tag, tagging, and tag clouds.
7 comments:
I experimented with delicious a couple of years ago but haven't used it much recently. I do like the tagging feature of the "encore" search software in the Madden Library which is very helpful in narrowing down searches.
I use tags in GMail and also in my blog. I haven't yet included the tag cloud on my blog though. However, I think tags are useful especially if I want to -re-read my posts on a certain topic (which I often find myself doing!!)
Havent used the tags so much but I have been using the label feature of gmail..
this delicious thing seems to be quiet interesting, will help me alot.
I use a tag feature in my gmail account but have never heared about the delicious. The delicious web site helped me a lot in explaining what are the various advantages of tagging.It seems easier to tag the stuff using delicious.
Tags are very useful in the realm of research as well as the creative stuff, I've found. On my creative Xanga site, I can make sure I'm accessing what I need or what I am searching for by checking tags. The library's website utilizes the tagging concept as well, in order to help students narrow down search results. This idea is completely useful.
Anirban:
I am familiar with tagging from the tagging feature in Facebook. I like it very much..
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