Tagging Is The New Search
Thursday 1 February 2007
A survey has shown that web users are increasingly 'tagging' content to help them organize photos or navigate web sites.
The research by Pew Internet shows that 28% of Americans have 'tagged' or categorized content they have found or created online such as photos, news stories or blog posts.
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Web sites like Flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us have grown in popularity as they allow users to assign keywords to describe materials to classify and help organize them.
Many users use these tags to help them navigate around their favorite sites.
Tagging is a useful way of organizing content such as photos - instead of just storing a holiday photo in one folder, the user could tag the image with various keywords such as "holiday", "2006", "France", "Jim", "Kate" and then build virtual collections of photos by searching those keywords.
Other popular online services such as Amazon allow users to tag popular products, whilst Gmail lets you bookmark e-mails.
Tagging is being seen as a new way of helping people find content online instead of relying on automated search engine results.
Pew Internet
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