Tag - You're Popular!

Tagging. Linking. Referencing. Whatever you want to call, make sure you do it!

Tagging is a salient feature of Web 2.0. technologies. According to "The State of the Live Web" by David Stifry, a tag is a way of categorizing or describing a topic, theme or words assigned by a creator on the web as a way of identification. As people link, reference or ‘tag’ each other on the network, the online community begins to flourish.

With the tagging feature, Technocrati has discovered an explosive growth with tagging indexes. With the large amount of tags used on the Internet, people are actively participating in a form of an online democracy. Users are collaborating, communicating, discovering and creating not only information, but budding friendships.

Tags are being used in videos, audio, podcasts and photos to represent various types of work. As Stifry observes, people are finding their own voice on the Internet, as well as finding their own unique element through others. Tags navigate what is “hot” at the moment and inform its audience about new and upcoming publications on the Internet.

Blogging, for example, is a great way to enhance democratic qualities on the web. According to Stifry, Technocrati tracks over 70 million weblogs and about 120,000 new weblogs are created worldwide everyday (that’s an unbelievable 1.4 blogs per second!). This expansive growth of blogging helps to:

1) Create and promote individuality and identity
2) Promote citizen journalism
3) Foster freedom of speech
4) Provide an equal opportunity (with those who have access to a computer and pay for Internet) to start a blog… FOR FREE (most of the time)!
5) Encourages social networking
6) A quick way to access information (hopefully truthful information at that!)
7) Encourage diversity (language, knowledge of different cultures)
8) (any of you bloggers got any other suggestions?)

What I found most interesting about this article was the rate increase of blogs during times of world crises. The example Stifry users is the war between Israel and Hezbollah. I would argue that the use of Web 2.0. technologies has provided great means for citizenship journalism to emerge. Citizens can provide a first-hand account and a variety of perspectives that are not constrained to a corporate capitalism newswire (AAAACHOO… FOX NEWS… bless me).

One question that sparked some interest and curiosity in me was Stifry’s mentioning of how audiences are having a hard time distinguishing blogs from other news sources, such as NewYorkTimes.com. The only thing I am concerned with is spam blogs, or what Stifry calls “splogs”. What happens if a blog produces misinformation? Wouldn’t this then discredit the blog as an untruthful source of information?

I think we may be depending on too many un-“professional” sources instead of the most authenticated and objective ones such as the New York Times. I think there is a willingness and readiness to believe quickly in what we read and thus we need to be conscious and aware of what information has or has not been filtered properly.

I do agree with Stifry that tagging seems to be the fad for Search Engine Optimization pundits. It seems like a nice way to not only build a community, but also to build some sort of reciprocal system, kind of like a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” deal….You tag my blog I’ll tag yours!