Monday January 24, 2005
It really seems like “tags” are starting to crawl into more and more webapplications these days, from del.icio.us, Flickr and a wide variety of other applications.
They’re great for quickly organizing “stuff” into freeform categories, no need to go to a separate page to create a “new category”, or in the worst case; forcing you to live with whatever categories the author thought up. Tags are the kind of metadata that everyone can understand and find useful.
Even something as traditional as email almost have tags now, as in Googles GMail where mails can be sorted into “labels”, although they aren’t as free-form as tags (ie. you can’t make them up on-the-fly; you have to create the label first on a separate screen). But it servers as evidence that something which can be an organizational nightmare can be easily organized with a supposedly “flat-file” system.