Does Tagging Work?

User tagging is much talked about on the Internet, and is extensively used for social bookmarking (del.icio.us, magnolia, rawsugar), blog posts (Technorati), community news sites (Digg.com, Newsvine), photo sharing sites (Flickr) and video sharing (YouTube). Subject directories such as Yahoo and Open Directory Project with their subject classification structures are considered very old Web 1.0 and nearly obsolete.

This presentation (Sept 2006) by Thomas Vander Wal (InfoCloudSolutions) on Understanding Folksonomy: Tagging that Works is a very good overview of what tags are and why some people love them.

In tagging, he explains, "People are not so much categorizing, as providing a means to connect items (placing hooks) and provide their meaning in their own understanding."

There are good examples from the main social bookmarking sites on how to use the tags to dig into a topic.