Tagging

Jr Conlin is ranting about tags on his blog. His point is that tags will be easily abused just like meta tags (keywords, description, and to a lesser degree title). I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago, and to some degree he is right. However, I still use meta tags at times. The reason is that meta tags should provide additional information about the content on a page. When the meta tags are congruent with the content on the page then spiders should weigh those keywords as an additional indication of the primary content on the page. I could be mistaken, but I think this is how Google and Yahoo are indexing pages.

Also, there are public tagging systems and closed tagging systems. This blog is attempting to participate in the tags while also maintaining an internal serendipity tagging system. I would like to one day move from a category system to only using internal tags. Then I would replace the category menu to the right with a list of the most [popular|recent|relative|*?] tags.

Tagging is still young and will prove to be a valuable part of the Web2.0. Freeform categorization is a valuable asset in an information management system (and I think a blog is a personal public information management system).

BTW, when people do abuse tagging to push a message to places that others don’t want it, it will be kinda like internet grafitti. It is kinda ironic that it is already called “tagging”.