Tags
Posted by Charlie
Over the last year or two tagging has become an extremely popular way of categorizing content. The idea is that users can type one or two words to describe something - be it a picture (Flickr) or map (MapBuzz).
It turns out that on the Web this is a much more successful approach to categorizing content than traditional top-down approaches that rely on rigid hierarchies. There's been a lot of debate about why this is - but one of the key reasons is that users are happy to add a one or two word description to something since its easy. But if they have to wade through a hierarchy of choices they don't bother.
Once content has been tagged it becomes searchable. There's even a successful web site, technorati that is a tag search engine for the web.
Right now we're in the process of finishing off our tagging support for MapBuzz. For the last few months you've been able to create maps that let you display features that have been tagged. For example, show me a map of all features tagged with 'bar'. We're also enabling maps themselves to be tagged as well as comments.
Once that is done, you can then search for those tags using MapBuzz's search functionality.