Tagging and Social Book Marking

Under the Social Media Tools and Services in the Tagging and Social Bookmarking lesson the major objectives I found are:-

• to understand the concept and purpose of tagging and social bookmarking; and

• to know how tagging and social bookmarking work within social media services

What I learned and discovered from this lesson are summarized below.

The meaning and use of metadata, that is, as metadata allows users to describe information and provide context to information within the electronic file. The most important way in which we describe documents and files on social networking services is “tagging”, adding tags or labels.

Tagging is a term used to describe human indexing of material on the Web, in order to make it easier to find and share. Tagging provides content with context and meaning. Tagging can provide different ways to navigate through content and discover new information.

Social Bookmarking services allow users to save web addresses on the Internet, under a personal account, and tag each page you find with keywords. The social aspects of these services allow users to share and create a collaborative “folksonomy” to describe and locate content on the web. 

There are different ways in which sites and services allow you to visualize the aggregated tags that you and other users have created. Tag visualization includes graphics, tag clouds, aggregated lists, tag searches and tag combinations.

Tags are used in multiple social networking services and sites with different purposes: aggregating content about users, providing intuitive navigation, facilitating access to data and improving search results.