Tagging - Part 1 of 3

[This is the first post in a 3 part series on the power of tags and how Bloozle
can leverage this feature to your advantage]

Tagging is one of the most ubiquitous features in the online world today.
However, it also remains one of the most under-rated and under-utilized tools.

A tag can be thought of as a personal keyword that you add to any content
in order to "pin" it for future use.(that's what you'd tell your grandmother and
your kids) People tag for the primary purpose of structuring information so that
it becomes easily retrievable and "recallable".

Another way of doing this could be to "bind" all content in a rigid hierarchy.
This could be useful in cases where previous classification has been done and
pre-defined categories exist and you just need to add newer categories. However,
if you are to begin from scratch; there could be a few hassles. The problem is
that you need to have an idea of all the possible use cases so that the hierarchy
is all encompassing and also that you need to devote time to run any content
through all branches of the hierarchy to determine which suits the content best
(one "item" can fall under one branch only). Now, most of us aren't experts on
everything under the sun and neither can we afford the luxury of time. Tagging
emerges as a brilliant way of managing our content and in the process, structuring
information for the better.

People can tag content with whatever comes to their mind and thus spend no time
in "categorizing" it and basically search for the tag whenever they want to
go back to the content. This ability to generate tags on the fly has fuelled
the popularity of sites that have ushered the "Web 2.0 era", namely del.icio.us
and Flickr. Tagging is a neat way to combat the avalanche of information.
Find something interesting? Just tag it "cool stuff" and explore it later.

(In fact, I'm wondering why no one has created a desktop based cool tagging
utility yet. I've seen some, none of which are worth mentioning. Windows Vista's
tagging utility is a good start, but has a long way to go yet.)