Tagging - A New Way to Categorize Items

After the unprecedented surge of Web 2.0, "Tagging" has become an integral part of Internet.Tagging has particularly made the life of bloggers easy.Not only bloggers ,but also blog readers take advantage of Tagging.

Tagging is a new way to categorize items (such as blog posts,bookmarks etc.) with the help of little keywords called as "Tags" or "Labels".Tags are one-word descriptors to help you organize and remember items.Tags are completely chosen by us.For Example - If you like/write an item on movie,then the possible tags are "Movie","Film","Actor","Actress" so on and so forth.Now, if you click on any tag all the articles related to that tag appear in front of you as a bunch.

You can assign as many tags as you like to an item.Multiple tags are generally seperated by commas.If you want to reclassify any item ,you just edit/delete the tags or add some more tags.So simple.

Sometimes we find a large collection of tags as shown belowThis large collection of tags is called "Tag Cloud".Inside the "tag cloud," tags are displayed larger and bolder when they are used more often. Thus, you can quickly see what tags other people are using, what items they are categorizing, and which tags are most popular. Clicking on separate tag links will show you other items that share a given tag.

Advantages

• Tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible option than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders.
  
• A human reader can probably tell the purpose of the page by quickly scanning the list of tags.
  
• You can drive traffic to your sites by using Social Bookmarking sites such as Delicious ,Technorati etc which support tagging.
  
• If the server supports tag searching, a reader would be able to find all pages that use a particular set of tags.
  
• If the page's author wishes to reclassify the page, all that is required is for them to change the list of tags.There is no need to relocate the page within a complex hierarchy of categories.

While using tags in such an organizational system is flexible and easy, tagging is not without its drawbacks. Typically there is no information about the meaning or semantics of a tag. For example, the tag "apple" might refer to the fruit, Apple Computer.

Note:For tags in this blog click on "Labels" option.