Tagging Definition - What is the meaning of tags on social bookmarking

Commonly used in blogs, site authors attach keyword descriptions (called tags) to identify images or text within their site as a categories or topic. Web pages and blogs with identical tags can then be linked together allowing users to search for similar or related content. If the tags are made public, online pages that act as a Web-based bookmark service are able to index them. Tags can be created using words, acronyms or numbers. Tags are also called labeling, tagging, blog tagging, folksonomies (short for folks and taxonomy), or social bookmarking. So, to define "tagging," you would essentially be assigning a keyword or phrase that describes the theme of a group of articles, photos, videos, or other types of media files as a way to organize them and access them easily later. A tag can also be used to assign a piece of content to another user. For example, if you published a couple of articles on a blog about dog training, but not all of your blog posts were about dog training, then you might assign just those couple of posts to the dog training tag for easy organization. You could also assign multiple tags to any post, like using a beginner dog training tag to distinguish among more advanced types of dog training posts.

If you uploaded a bunch of photos on Facebook of a wedding you attended, you could tag your friends' profiles to the specific photos where they appear. Tagging on social media is great for getting conversations going.

All sorts of web services use tagging -- from social networks and blogging platforms, to cloud-based productivity tools and team collaboration tools. In general, you can either tag pieces of content, or you can tag people (like their social profiles).

A tag is a keyword or phrase used to group a collection of content together, or to assign a piece of content to a specific person.

Examples of use tagging online.

Tagging on Blogs

Many blog systems allow authors to add free-form tags to a post, along with (or instead of) placing the post into categories. For example, a post may display that it has been tagged with baseball and tickets. Each of those tags is usually a web link leading to an index page listing all of the posts associated with that tag. The blog may have a sidebar listing all the tags in use on that blog, with each tag leading to an index page. To reclassify a post, an author edits its list of tags. All connections between posts are automatically tracked and updated by the blog software; there is no need to relocate the page within a complex hierarchy of categories.

Given that WordPress is currently the most popular blogging platform on the web, we'll focus on how tagging works for this particular platform. WordPress generally has two major ways that users can organize their pages and posts -- categories and Categories are used to group larger groups of content based on a general theme. Tags, on the other hand, allow users to get more specific, grouping content with multiple keyword and phrase tags in order to get super descriptive. 

Some WordPress users put "tag clouds" in their sidebars of their sites, which look like a collection of keywords and phrase links. Simply click on a tag, and you'll see all the posts and pages that were assigned to that tag.

Tagging on Social Networks

Tagging on social networks is extremely popular, and it's the best way to make your content more visible to the right people. Each platform has its own unique tagging style, yet they all follow the same general idea.

On Facebook, you can tag friends in photos or posts. Simply click on the "Tag photo" option at the bottom of the photo to click a face and add a friend's name, which will send a notification to them that they've been tagged. You can also tag a friend's name in any post or comment section by typing the @ symbol followed by their name, which will trigger automatic friend suggestions for you to choose from.

On Instagram, you can pretty much do the same thing.

Tagging posts, however, helps more users who aren't already connected to you find your content when they search for specific tags. All you have to do is type the # sign before a keyword or phrase in the caption of comments of a post to assign the tag to it.

Of course, when it comes to Twitter, everyone knows about hashtags. Like Instagram, you have to add that # symbol to the beginning or a keyword or phrase to tag it, which will help people follow the discussion you're in and see your tweets.

Difference between Tags and Hashtags

They're both almost identical, but have some subtle differences. Firstly, a hashtag always involves including a # symbol at the beginning, and is usually only used for following social content and discussions on social media.

Tagging usually applies to people and blogging. For example, most social networks need you to type the @ symbol first to tag another user, and blogging platforms have sections of their own in their back-end areas to add tags, which don't require typing a # symbol.

Tagging on Cloud-based Tools

More cloud-based tools for productivity and collaboration have been jumping on the tagging bandwagon, offering ways for users to organize their content and get other users' attention.

Evernote, for example, allows you to add tags to your notes to keep them nice and organized. And most collaboration tools like Trello and Podio allow you to tag other users' names to easily interact with them.

So, all you really need to know is that tagging offers a convenient way to organize, find, and follow information -- or alternatively interact with people. Every tag is a clickable link, which takes you either to the page where you can find the collection of information or the tagged person's profile.

Tagging History

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 1997, the collaborative portal "A Description of the Equator and Some Other Lands" produced by document X, Germany, coined the folksonomic term Tag for its co-authors and guest authors on its Upload page. In "The Equator" the term Tag for user-input was described as an abstract literal or keyword to aid the user. Turned out in Web 1.0 days, all "Other-lands" users defined singular Tags, and did not share Tags at that point.

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 browse-able 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. Other traditional and web applications have incorporated the concept such as "Labels" in Gmail and the ability to add and edit tags in iTunes or Winamp.

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.

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

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