Tagging

To me, tagging has use, but not to the extent that it's currently touted as having. Or maybe I should qualify that I mean that for my life personally. Let's start with delicious, which is where I did first see tagging as an option. Back then, the main idea behind the site was just having an online place for your bookmarked websites so that you could access them from any computer. Still useful, although in no way replaces bookmarks the normal way. And since I'm such a big user of those, then the tagging is irrelevant to me. I use folders instead. The organization behind the tagging is there. what I don't really subscribe to is the sharing of tags. Apparently a big part of delicious now that I'm missing out on. Oh well.
For me, tagging became useful with Shelfari. Once you get a whole bunch of books, it's helpful to be able to organize them. The way that you can do this in Shelfari is only with tagging, as far as I know. So I tag my books when it's convenient for me. I don't do it for anyone else to use.
The other site I use tags with is blogging. This blog will be tagged for any reader to have access to my plethora of knowledge- or opinions. I know this can be useful because I know of blogs that I need to be able to search. OK, I haven't done this yet. Not sure if it'll work. I need to look for trailers on Naomi Bates' blog, and if I can search and go right to a blog entry for that book, it'll save time. NOw if the tags don't allow that to happen, then I'll be frustrated and know that we have a long way to go.
I see the use of tagging photos- especially in a site like Flickr so you can find pics that fit your need quickly. The real reason it works here is cause you can't just search the "whole text". Without text assigned to it, how can you make a match with a search? That must be why Google Images is so darn popular. Too bad the kids don't realize the copyright issues at stake there.
So that leads me into my philosopy on the whole thing. It's like keyword searching in the library. Extremely useful cause it saves time and allows those less educated to be more successful. Why not? Yeah, semantics need to get worked out. Us experts don't need to be the ones doing it. Power to the people! An analogy to consider: is a site or object without tags like a book without an index?