Web In Depth

I have heard about this for some time from various sources but did not pay much attention to it until I read this article on ReadWriteWeb on how to rebirth the activity of tagging. This sort of pulled me in to study little more depth what tagging is. The main points that surprised me in this article was that

1. Interest in tagging has waned, which was contrary to my belief that tagging has really taken of.

2. New emerging trends in using tagging.

So what is tagging, I would define is as the association of a word or words that describe the essence of some information. The information can be text, photos, video, maps, and podcast, anything that contain audio/visual information. This association is tagging which is done by human beings, and the words are tags. Eg: I can tag my previous post as facebook. What does that do? it allows you dear reader to recognize from just reading that word what my post is all about. To make it more specific I can add several more tags like applications, street racing, and zombie. Obviously anybody familiar with facebook will at once be clear on the specifics of the post which is great (you may not understand why its great just be patient). For those who don’t know about Facebook this may confuse you into thinking why I am talking of zombies in the same breath as facebook. Actually this is one fundamental problem with tagging which I will touch on in depth later.

Any piece of information can be tagged by two types of people

1. The creator Eg: Myself
2. The reader Eg:You

Some web content allows only creator tagging, as in blogging where I can tag my articles by whatever tag I think is appropriate. Then there are social bookmarking sites like delicious that allows users to bookmark there favorite web pages and tag it with descriptive tags.

So what is the advantage of this whole process? To discuss that we need to go to the time when tags were not used. Initially web pages had content that where categorized into several categories by author. These categories were fixed and very broad and any reader had to go through lot of articles in the category to get the specific article he wants.Eg: If there was a category in sports I have to search through all sport related articles (can be really huge) to get what I want which is “How to construct a cricket bat” see how specific this article is. If there was tagging then the author could have tagged it as cricket, bat and I would have found it much easily using a tag search. ( Note: you need tag search ability in the server). This same advantage is there when users tag interested information because then you can get lot of extremely relevant information buy doing a tag search (Which is the real value of sites like delicious). There is one main reason why this is useful, because humans are doing it and always the judgment of humans are much better than any automated bot or fixed categories. I guess by know you can see how this form of human tagging may replace search engines. Search engines only have automate bots, which decides on the relevancy based on keywords, which can be misleading.

Eg: a story on X-men may contain word “Storm” but has nothing to do with weather.

Eg: While humans can tag sites as supercool, which will give other humans that it’s worth checking out you can’t search for supercool and get same result in web search.

So can they replace Search Engines? Probably not but I will cover arguments for both sides in my next post.