Tag, You're it!

Researching today, I came across this report. It focuses on the importance of tagging keywords in blogs and web pages. Even though it was released in January, I learned a few things as I was reading through it.

--On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.
--Taggers look like classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income.

Since this report was written, there has been this new trend that has gained speed. Since I felt that this report may have been a little out of date, I dug deeper into the Internet and found the revolution that is following it. This bulletin from ASIS&T published in October delves into the new concept of folksonomies. Folksonomies is the practice of collaborative tagging.

Thomas Vander Wal was the pioneer of this word, and he defines it as, “folksonomies are created when people tag items online for their own later information retrieval purposes.” The two main benefits according to Vander Wall are:

--Online personal information management since the tags are coined in the user’s own words, not in the words imposed by the system
--The social aspect, including the ability of other users to use those tags for search and retrieval of previously undiscovered items and the community created by and centered on users’ tags.

Collaborative tagging is also an important part of this concept. Since it comes from the user’s vocabulary, so many different tag words can be used to describe just one object. This can cover all bases and every one can find the different tags according to the way they think. All the different words can come together in the tag cloud, and at once new communities can be born.

As companies come into the modern 2.0 era and focus on being sought out on the Internet by their consumers, tagging will become more important. Even here at the PCC blog, we rely heavily on our tags to bring new readers into our posts. Folksonomies can be found everywhere on the internet, from Flickr to different work blogs. How can these two concepts benefit us in Enterprise 2.0? With the wide variety of information available, not everyone will use the same words as descriptors. I believe that this concept will expand and grow, and everyone from the regular Flickr user to the enterprise with thousands of employees can benefit from collaborative tagging. We can especially all benefit from community taggings, as new perspectives are frequently discovered when collaborating on subjects together. How can folksonomies bring new perspectives into your business world?