At the heart of social media, is tagging; like the icebreaker used at a cocktail party, your name badge at a conference, contact info on your business card; tagging has become a part of your social profile.  When you get right down to it, tagging provides a birds-eye view of how we see and experience the world, and also how we’re perceived.

Wikipedia defines a tag, as a “non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching.”  According to recent research millions of Americans are tagging every day.  Gene Smith wrote an entire book about tagging: Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web (Voices That Matter).  Smith begins the book with a great example:

“…visit the Danbury Library’s online catalog something rather unlike a typical library.  A search for The Catcher in the Rye brings up not just a call number but also a list of related books and tags–keywords such as “adolescence,” “angst,” “coming of age” and “New York”–that describe J.D. Salinger’s classic novel.  Click the tag “angst” and you’ll find a list of angsty titles such as The Bell Jar, The Stranger….”

Tagging and Del.icio.us

The social bookmarking site, Del.icio.us, introduced a collaborative tagging system in 2003.  In del.icio.us, users may store, share, and discover web bookmarks. Through bookmarking websites and tagging material, you can further explore topics, and connect with other users who have shared interests.

In January of 2008, my colleagues and I started adding bookmarks to del.icio.us.  One of the main focuses of our blog is social media, and as a result, it’s one of the top ten tags we use.  When I searched del.icio.us to see how many other people have bookmarked a url with the tag “social media”, 97,045  results came up. Of those, the highest ranking post with the tags social media was Mashable.com, which 12,797 people bookmarked and tagged. (1976 people even took the time to write notes about the site.)

So what does tagging do for us in del.icio.us?  It shows a list of all the other users who have saved the same page. I can click on anyone of those users and see their recommendations.  If I find a like-minded user, I can add them to my network.  As del.icio.us explains, “Your network connects you to other [Delicious] users – friends, family, even new people you run across. You can add people to your network and keep track of their latest bookmarks.  And when you save new bookmarks, you can share them with people in your network simply by clicking on a username.”

Why Should We Care About Tagging?

Tagging is big! It’s everywhere you look these days–on Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Slideshare, blogs, gmail, Amazon.com and more. Tagging help us organize information.

Think of it this way, you wouldn’t go out of your way to save a document to your hard drive without naming it.  As a computer user, you’ve become accustomed to file the document in a folder where you have a reasonably good chance of finding it.  Note: I said, reasonably.  If it isn’t already, tagging will become second nature.

As Gene Smith suggests, tagging helps facilitate collaboration, findability, and participation; it can spark innovation, and align our efforts.  Tagging lets our voices be heard–it helps them matter, even more.