As an avid patron of Amazon.com, I have found their tag clouds especially useful. This was the first website that I remember employing tagging in the consumer world, but I figured it probably started elsewhere….and indeed, it did….and many years before Amazon.com employed this feature.
One of the first consumer products to include tagging was the Lotus Magellan product in 1988; in 2001, Bitzi, a digital media encyclopedia, started to allow tagging of any media that had a URL. But tagging didn’t become extremely popular until sites like Flickr and del.icio.us allowed users to set their own tags. However, because users were allowed to informally and personally choose their own tags, more ambiguity was created. Nevertheless, tagging between web/blog servers has led to the rise of folksonomy classification, the concept of social bookmarking, and other forms of social software–empowering Web 2.0 tools and users. More and more web users not only use tagging to find more information or products, but they also tag their own pictures, blogs, etc. Even libraries are jumping on the tagging bandwagon–LibraryThing, probably being the most prominent.
On his site, Thomas Vander Wal, a principal and senior consultant for InfoCloud Solutions, Inc., and a technology blogger, discusses how tagging services still have a long way to go in order increase portability, functionality, and disambiguity. Technorati is one company/site that has made great strides in trying to set up blog tags and tag searches in order to solve the problem of too many tag term variations; however, many problems still exist.
I found Vander Wal’s analysis intriguing because I have found myself lost in the world of tag clouds that sometimes irrationally direct me to random sites/information that have nothing to do with my original topic. Tagging is just another example of a great Web 2.0 tool that has progressed over time, but still has a long way to go in order to become more functional and user-friendly. Libraries need to be aware of both the advantages and disadvantages of tagging in order to better assist patrons in finding their desired information, while also providing users with room for creativity to make their own tags.
