I was first introduced to the tagging craze with Adobe Photoshop Album which I received as a Christmas present last year. Among other things, the software allows you to "tag" your photos with the people, things, or events that pertain to the picture. In other words, you are able to quickly describe your photos so that you can search or filter through them later.
Tagging has been active in the online world for some time, but is starting to hit the mainstream. The most popular things being tagged are blogs, bookmarks, and photos. Technorati does all three and aggregates the information into a psuedo online newspaper with literally millions of individual publishers. My favorite photo tagging site Flickr and I am starting to use del.icio.us to organize my bookmarks.
The power of tagging is two-fold. One advantage is that you are no longer limited to storing things in folder structure. Folders are great when the things you are storing clearly only belong in one folder. However its difficult to find things later if they could have logically been stored in more than one place. For example, does that picture of Aunt Sally belong in the Family folder or the 2001 folder? Tags allow you to assign multiple categories to a document so it can be found via more than one means. The second advantage is in the ability to share information with others with similar interests. Want to find monkey photos or surreal art links? Believe it or not, someone else does too.
I expect the major search engines will delve deeper into tagging in the near future to allow the greater public to take advantage of this simple yet powerful categorization tool. Until then, start tagging.
