Who Knows Anything? The blog of Chip Gallent. eBusinessman.

Tagging: The New Killer App

Posted by Chip

I believe that we have entered into a new realm around the Internet. It seems like we can finally - I don't want to use the word "trust" ... but something close - come to terms with the fact that the tagging of content is working the way it's supposed to.

If you're not familiar with this idea, check out this article: Wikipedia: Tag (metadata)

Traditionally we have relied on things like search engines to scan the web and make a determination as to what it was ingesting - and that still happens. But, there is now a concerted effort for user generated tags for every kind of content out there. Check out the bottom of this post and you'll see a set of links next to "Technorati" - those are tags. I have determined that there are some keywords that I would like to have associated with this article - by listing them I have "tagged" my content.

Here's a great example of a best practice for tagging. At BarCamp Nashville, one of the first things that they asked everyone to do was tag there content with the phrase "barcampnashville". Now when everyone submitted their content to thinks like Technorati, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress and others - those tags would all show up and everyone would have access to content from that event. Just look at Technorati and see how much content is there with this tag: barcampnashville.

Now why would this be a killer app?

I think that's easy to answer. Traditionally we all have been subject to metatag spam from websites all over the net. You've, I'm sure, searched for a phrase over at Google and it returned a bunch of irrelevant junk. In the early days of the net website operators used a bunch of covert techniques to make this happen. I believe that this phase of the web is nearly over, mainly because of tagging. Users are passively policing content and making the web better for all of us.