The importance of tags in a universe of hypertexts
Monday, January 12th, 2009
A TAG is simply a label. But if so, what importance can a simple label have in the universe of the Internet?
Have you ever been surfing the Internet and found yourself in a site completely different from the one you had started from, with contents that have nothing to do with the original site? Or have you ever been unable to find the site or the piece of information that you had managed to find a short time before?
The thing is that surfing the Internet is often a bit like free-wheel thinking: you know where you start, but you do not know where you will end. Hyperlinks subvert any hierarchy, knocking down the barriers of linearity and the boundaries of navigation. The web, like our mind, follows the laws of quantum physics rather than those of logic and statistics.
In the case of web navigation, we can use “Bookmarks” to memorize an interesting link. But what happens after we have carried out the same operation for hundreds of sites? Who uses a minute of his/her time to reorganize bookmarks after navigation?
We very often end up with dozens of bookmarks within only one category, or even worse, we find them all with no category or logical order.
In this case, it would be very useful to be able to associate every bookmark to one or more labels such as: “quantum_physics”, “quantum_thought”, “physics”, “video”, “interesting”, “for_blog”, so that, when necessary, it will be enough to search in our tags to find the information again.
The habit of tagging (labelling) information in a personalized way gives us many further possibilities, when compared with the simple possibility to register it in only one category. For example, if I wanted to register a video on quantum physics, I could decide to create tags which describe its contents (“quantum_physics”, “quantum”, “physics”), the medium (“video”), a subjective judgement (“interesting”), a hint for a future use (“for_blog”) and a creative “conceptual extension” (“quantum_thought”).
Try and do the same creating a hierarchy of categories: can you do that at all?
