COMP3505/Assignment 1 - Lochan Baratakke/41476662

Tags

The Digital Revolution has brought with it, as a result of a continuous, phenomenal increase in the power of devices such as computers and telecommunications and their declining prices, the inevitable proliferation of information. For its use, this information first needs to be retrieved. And for that to happen, it is only natural that these unthinkably large amounts of information be sorted, be categorized in some way. This is where Metadata, information about information, comes in. And there is one form of Metadata in particular that has gained tremendous popularity in the recent past: Tags. Tags or labels are essentially keywords that, unlike classic, formally defined classification methods which are otherwise controlled by the information provider, the people who run the websites, put the creator of the content at the wheel when it comes to content categorization. What follows is an experience I’ve had in using tags in five such websites.

Tags have been used to categorize various forms of content: textual, audio, video and pictorial. Ever since I can remember, Blogger has allowed its users to use tags to associate their blogs with certain keywords. del.icio.us, a social bookmarking website uses the concepts of tags to classify WebPages according to what its users think they best describe. The popular photo-sharing website Flickr uses tags to relate to the pictures its users upload to share. last.fm, an internet radio broadcasting and music-centred community website uses a tag-based classification system for its audio content. Facebook has its own adaptation of tags to link people in a picture to their profiles. Although these websites use the same concept of tags, they don’t necessarily use them in the same way and use to different degrees.

Blogger uses tags as “labels”. At the time a user publishes a blog, he/she chooses the keywords he/she deems appropriate for the blog’s content. The system makes mention of the labels of a published blog on its footer and also allows for a topic based view of blogs with that same label. In dealing with a large number of blogs, labels could be used to search for blogs. In using Blogger, I found that there was no central area on the website where I could find blogs by different sorted by labels. Having used Wordpress, another blog publishing system which lists a whole bunch of popular tags, a “Tag Cloud” on their homepage, I found the absence of this particular feature on Blogger rather disappointing. Wordpress displays popular labels with a relatively increased font size, an approach I remember Blogger used. I have no idea why Blogger has done away a feature I thought of as being useful and popular.

del.icio.us heavily relies on tags to organize its content and like Wordpress, uses Tag Clouds in a section of the site it calls “tags to watch”. The Tag Cloud can be sorted either alphabetically or by popularity. A registered user sees the tags he shares in a red typeface, which is a nice way to keep track of the genre of websites one is normally inclined to using. The user can also have a Tag Cloud view in his own collection of bookmarks if he chooses to. del.icio.us takes tagging a step further with what it calls “Bundled tags”. When one bundles tags, he/she assigns a categories for them, essentially tagging the tag! However, this feature applies only to the individual’s collection of tagged bookmarks. What’s also available on del.icio.us on searching for a particular tag is a list of related tags. Tags can be searched for or directly be accessed through a link such as del.icio.us/popular/ Although it yields only a fraction of the results, del.icio.us almost makes itself an alternative to using search engines as a means of finding relevant results with its use of tags, with popularity of a website/webpage based on a more human perspective rather than it being a search-engine crawler function looking for the number of occurrences of a certain keyword. Tags on del.icio.us also allow for users to find other people with similar interests, adding to the meaning of the term “social bookmarking”. Apart from bookmarking websites and WebPages del.icio.us also helps tag mp3s with Play Tagger.

Since its launch in 2004, Flickr has used a tag-based categorization scheme with several enhancements, one of which is the Geotagging system. The Geotagging system allows users to add location information to the pictures they upload onto Flickr using Organizr, Flickr’s batch-photo management system. This location information helps view pictures in a geographic view by allowing the user to view pictures on a Google Map-like interface. Tags can be used in ways such as this to enhance user-experience.

last.fm is yet another community based around music that employs tags. Also using Tag Clouds, last.fm tags songs and artists based on genre. Tags on last.fm are also used to associate songs and artists with keywords describing feelings, moods, ambience and other associations listeners make with music by an artist. According to last.fm, Tags help develop “an always-evolving ecosystem of keyword-based playlists”.

Facebook uses tags to a lesser extent as compared to the other websites mentioned in this post. Facebook applies tags exclusively to the photographs that its users upload onto their albums. At the time of uploading, the user marks a certain portion of the picture, usually the face of a person, and assigns that area a tag. This rectangular portion usually is linked to the profile of that person but can be omitted. When a person is tagged in any picture by a friend, the former is notified of the event on his/her Mini-Feed. Tagging in this way allows for a view unlike that of the usual Friends List, by giving the visitor a peek at what a set of friends have been up to, where they have been and all the things one can gather from a picture. The notification could also initiate a social interaction through dialogue between the people tagged and other friends on the same page the picture appears in.

Tags will undoubtedly continue to grow in use as a simple classification method and with ingenuity as in Geotags. I believe that their strength lies in the flexibility they offer to authors of the content they create on the ever-increasing breadth of the web. The interactions they allow for socially, through use of websites such as Flickr, del.icio.us, last.fm and YouTube cannot be ignored.