tagging the web

It’s funny how sometimes it takes a long time before a simple, small, yet brilliant idea pops into someone’s head and unleashes it on the world.
Now it’s hard to tell who came up with it first because tags have been around in all sorts of things, like the CVS version control system for instance, but recently, tagging has gone through the roof… and why the hell not.

It’s easy to set up, and it’s easy to find stuff when tagged properly.
Gmail allows you to tag your email, which is a hell of a lot better than stashing your emails into archiving folders in your mailbox. I’m wishing I could use GMail at work really, tagging made me hate filling emails these days.

Then there’s Flickr who allows you to tag your photo’s, and then use the tag search pages to find other people’s images tagged with keywords you’re interested in.

del.icio.us (edit: link removed due to suspicious activity) and its open source counterpart de.lirio.us calls it social bookmarks, and users tag the links they submit. Other online bookmark managers like Furl do the same and my personal favorite linkagogo has recently started a Society section which uses a keyword based filing system.

And then there’s technorati’s approach to tags which is bloody brilliant.
Since they index shitloads of blogs out on the wild, wild web automatically, and are thus not submitted by users who can nicely enter a bunch of tags with each post, they allowed the bloggers to add the tags to their pages by simply adding a rel="tag" attribute to a number of tag-hyperlinks.

If you can insert a hyperlink, you can insert a technorati tag.
Simple isn’t it?

Another cool thing about the technorati tag pages is that they also display related tags content from other sites like Flickr and Furl, giving you more related content (usually). I’m using them in my latest posts now, and besides the fact that it’s kinda neat to see them show up in the related tag pages after technorati indexes the posts, it also gets you some extra hits as checking a tag of interest will always give you something worth checking out.