Introduction to Tags

Tags are keywords that describe what something is.

Tags are an important internet concept closely tied to the semantic web:

The basic idea is that for the internet to be all that it can be, stuff on the internet needs to be well labeled. Otherwise there’s only one mammoth haystack and everyone has lost their needle.

I used to live in a dormitory. It’s a great example of a community setting. I learned that there are two ways of handling the dishes and the housework. One is to set up a (fair) schedule where every week one person does a particular task. Every week you pick one guy to do the dishes. All the dishes. Even if it takes his entire day (you think I’m kidding, right?) If he doesn’t do them, everyone else throws things at him. And feels glad that it’s not their turn.

The other way is for everyone to clean up their own dishes. You used it, you wash it. You don’t put it in the sink.

The internet is a communal environment, and content is the equivalent of the dishes. It’s great to have content, but you have to manage it or things become messy.

Tags are the way we do the dishes (the second way). When someone puts something up on the internet, it’s considered their job to tell everyone else what it is. Think of tags as the search keywords you’d like the thing you’re posting to be associated with.

Of course, once you give people an idea to run with, you have no guarantee that they won’t run away with it. To the great chagrin of the academics who wrote the wikipedia article, people on the internet have largely hijacked the concept of tagging for their own social purposes – telling jokes, being sarcastic, making political statements.

Huh. Who woulda thought that not everone is interested in building a comprehensive and consistent metadata repository?

When I tag, I ask the question, “What is this about?”. I pick three or four terms that best describe the post, and put them in. The tags for this post are: “internet, semantic web, dishes, tags”.

Generally they’re a less structured form of organization than categorization. I could try and build a detailed hierarchy of subject matter… But what happens when an article falls under one or more categories? Do I file this under “Dishes?” or “The Internet?”

The real world is messy, so tags are messy. The internet can’t work like a filing cabinet. It’s more like a really big bag of things – you just reach in and feel around for what you want.

If you’re looking for something pokey, the thing that is pokey had better advertise the fact that it’s pokey, or you’ll never find it.