Talking Tech

In an upcoming post, I will be describing blogs - what they are and how and when they are used. But before I do so, I’d like to share a fundamental piece of the Web 2.0 world.

Tags.

Tags are the words used to describe content.

For example, this blog post will be tagged with words like “tags” and “web 2.0″. Photos can be tagged with the names of the people in them, a location, or even subject matter or theme.

Tags are words to describe content.

So what’s the big deal, then?

The big deal lies in the search-ability of the web.

Historically, information was categorized and organized by genre or topic, by necessity. In order to find something, a hierarchy of organization helped steer you to the right physical location where you’d find the book, the CD, or the word in the dictionary.

Just recently, the fiction collection at our Main Library went through a re-vamp and books became sorted by genre instead of by author name. This categorization of materials is necessary because books take up physical space and need to be somewhere.

Digital information is not like this.

Digital information can be anywhere.

Digital information can be accessed from everywhere.

Digital information can be “tagged” by genre AND by author name AND by title AND by topic AND by style AND by anything else that’s appropriate. With smart and helpful tagging, anything of relevance can be associated with the information.

Think about that for a second. All information can be kept WITHOUT hierarchy. WITHOUT categories. WITHOUT shelves.

But who assigns the tags? Who is responsible for organizing all of this information?

We are. You are.

Everyone is.

Everytime we post a blog, upload a photo, contribute to a wiki, or submit a video, we can tag. These tags become the way we find information. Remember, Time Magazine named you (us) Person of the Year, for this very reason. Because it is the everyday person that is now creating, publishing, and organizing information. Experts beware.

Here’s an example: I was looking for a photo to place in this post. So I went to Flickr - a site for uploading and sharing photos. I went to Creative Commons - photos available for use. Then I searched within the site for tags of “tag”. That’s how I found the photo I used. (Get it? It’s a box of dog tags.)

I’m sharing this now, because how information is handled, is a fundamental piece of how the new Web works. [Side note: remember...when I say "new", I mean new to us. For the kids, the web has ALWAYS worked this way. Important to keep in mind.]

Here’s a terrific video, Information R/evolution by Mike Wesch, the cultural anthropology professor who also brought us “The Machine is Us/ing Us” (this video is also in the sidebar to the right).  It’s a little “motion-sickness-y” at the start, but a very thought-provoking look at how information is no longer organized and found the way it used to be.

(Thanks to Kim for sharing this video and getting me thinking.)

With digital information, categories and shelves aren’t needed anymore. And if there aren’t categories, then as David Weinberger says, Everything is Miscellaneous.

We have to LET GO of our need to understand where everything is and how it is related (this can be discovered when you need it). Instead, “where” doesn’t matter anymore. Web search and tagging find information wherever it is.

Our collective intelligence shapes how information is shared and managed, through our own choices of tags.

Then we’ll have to figure out what to do with it. And that’s where the real learning begins.

Technorati Tags: tags web2.0 mwesch information

Photo by dontbe10, found at Flickr Creative Commons.