The Text Book Answer: What is Social Tagging?

Worldwide there are over one billion people online, and the ways that they are connecting and creating together are literally exploding. (Richardson p.87, 2009) We are already seeing social connections on websites such as Facebook—a social networking site where friends request friends to chat with, comment on, and post photos of others. Another popular site Wikipedia—is an example of a social encyclopedia. Anyone can post, edit and delete on a Wikipedia page. Tagging is a buzzword that started a few years ago. It has since evolved from technical Internet code to a user-friendly tool that helps people to search, explore, and locate information on the Internet.

Social Tagging became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software application including social bookmarking and annotating photographs. (Folksonomy, 2009) Social Tagging is a technical feature of organizing information on the World Wide Web. Using metadata that consists of keywords and phrases the user arranges information how they prefer to organize their favorite websites. The result has been a boom in websites built specifically to cater to “Social Tagging”. These are all used differently; some are based on tagging socially (by people you know), academically (by subject matter), or strictly for functionality (organizing all your many bookmarked websites). Even though Social Tagging is a considerably young concept, it has a history and technical evolution that has created a plethora of functional websites that are based on the concept of “tagging”.

There are a few different definitions of social tagging on the web. Some sites focus on tagging being the assignment of words to digital content, like photos, bookmarks, and blogs. Others focus on the managing of tags to categorize content. Overall, from what I have read the consensus is that Social Tagging is a tool that makes searching the Internet easier.

Social Bookmarking—a subtopic of social tagging—is the practice of saving bookmarks of website addresses to a public website and “tagging” them with keywords. (Lomas, 2005) The bookmarks that are tagged can then be searched by phrase, popularity, and by the person who tagged them. Searching by person is why it is referred to as “social” bookmarking. Author Will Richardson explains it well in his book “Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts. He says millions of people have begun using public online book marking services where they can save links, annotate them with unique keywords or tags to organize them, and then share the links with the world. (Richardson p. 88, 2009)

When researching social tagging the word folksonomy appears many times. Folksonomy is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. (folksonomy, 2009) A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and Delicious. (folksonomy, 2009) On Flickr someone might tag a series of photographs that the have taken of horses with words such as horse, beautiful, pony, brown, animal, etc. The series of photographs that were tagged are now searchable by other people on the Internet looking for images with the keyword or phrase “beautiful, brown, horses.

Technically speaking, Social Tagging is a type of metadata where one or more descriptive words (keywords) are assigned to an asset. (nihlibrary, 2009) On websites, there is a gadget that one can add to their own personal blogs that displays the tags in the form of a word cloud. The larger the word the more popular that particular word search is. Users of the Internet that are tagging their photos and bookmarks are creators of the meta data that is used to categorize the Internet by the people using it. The experts who program the websites that are used for tagging purposes also create the metadata. The idea that words are being freely chosen besides being pre-determined by programmers is another aspect of what makes tagging on the Internet social and collaborative. An example of using meta data to organize information is on the I pod. I pods use meta data in much of the same way. The songs on the I pod have information like artist name, song title, album title, and genre attached to them. This helps the listener find the song that they want.

The result of tagging with keywords can be a rewarding gain in the user's capacity to find related content (a practice known as "pivot browsing"). Part of the appeal of folksonomy is its inherent subversiveness: when faced with the choice of the search tools that Web sites provide, folksonomies can be seen as a rejection of the search engine status quo in favor of tools that are created by the community.(folksonomy, 2009) In other words, instead of using the Google search engine, one may find better more extensive results from their research by looking at other people’s bookmarks on delicious.com.

Some of the top social tagging sites according to Mashable.com are;
Diigo.com, which is a site that highlights portions of a webpage, write on it like you would a piece of paper, share with your group, and search all publicly saved pages. (Aune, 2007) There are many different sites that allow you to organize and tag your bookmarks such as:
BmAccess.net - Bookmark a site, add tags, when you look up a tag, you get the names and a little thumbnail image of the site along with it.
BlogMarks.net – Allows one to save your bookmarks, tag them with keywords for easy searching amongst your list, share with others.
Givealink.org – Allows one to donate your bookmarks to this site to help them recommend sites and get a better understanding of how each person bookmarks. Some of these websites are based on searching other websites using likes and dislikes that you declare.
StumbleUpon.com - Lets you “channel surf” the Internet and review sites; it learns what you like and recommends more of the same.
WireFan.com – Allows one to vote on links as well as add thumbnails for sites.
Lilisto.com - Ratings, notes, categories, smart categories and in-page editing. There are also social tagging sites strictly for clinicians doing research. There are themed sites for businesses and the list goes on.

Social Tagging has evolved into a tool for the everyday user of the Internet. Using keywords to tag bookmarks and pictures, and people make it easy for everyone to find information, collaborate on projects, and brainstorm ideas. Tagging is changing the way research is completed, it is eliminating the general use of search engines, and allowing individuals to find more specific information on the many web pages of the Internet. It is the group effort that makes it possible for this idea to work. Hence why it is considered social.


Bibliography

Aune, S. (2007). Social Bookmarking: 50+ Social Bookmarking Sites
Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2007/08/08/social-bookmarking-2/ on March 9th 2009

Folksonomy. (2009). Wikipedia
Retrieved from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy on March 9th 2009

Lomas. C. (2005). 7 things you should know about social bookmarking
Retreived from: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/ELI/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAbout/39378?time=12361767687 on March 4th 2009

NIH Library. (2009). Social Tagging FAQ
Retrieved from: http://nihlibrary.nih.gov/FAQ/SocialTaggingFAQ.htm on March 9th 2009

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful web tools for
classrooms. California: Corwin Press