Tag, You're It!

I expected folksonomy to be something crazy and complex; and honestly, when you get down to the technical stuff behind folksonomy, it probably is; but when I read that it is merely tagging, I thought what?! That's it? It gets a big name, but it's something common to the point that we don't even really think about it? And really, it is. Folksonomy is an extremely effective tool that most people take for granted, but it is immensely helpful. Tags are what make the search features on a web page so efficient! Take YouTube for example. Every video is tagged and categorized. Say I want to look up the "Kitty Cat Dance" video on YouTube; I type "kitty cat dance" into the search bar, and the "Kitty Cat Dance" video pops up! But I notice, while the Steve Ibsen original is the video that tops the list, there are other videos on the list as well. Why are these here? Because they are tagged under "kitty", "cat", and/or "dance." I select the "Kitty Cat Dance" video, and watch it. The tags for the video are, obviously, "kitty", "cat", and "dance," and the category is comedy. There's also a side bar, that says "Related Videos." The tags on videos allow this feature; because every video is tagged, each video can have a related video list, based on what the tags are. Topping the "related videos" list for the Kitty Cat Dance is "The Mean Kitty Song." So when I check this out, I see why it was on "Kitty Cat Dance"'s related videos list; the tags for "The Mean Kitty Song" are "cory", "williams", "SMP", "films", "kitty", "song", "sparta", and "cat." So, "The Mean Kitty Song" has two of the same tags as "Kitty Cat Dance."

Another one of my favorite web pages that uses tags is ICanHasCheezburger.com. Now, granted, this website is in semi-blog format; most blogs do tend to have tags. However, this is very helpful. For example, I remembered a very cute LOL that I wanted to use in my PowerPoint presentation on Internet Memes; I wasn't sure where on the page I'd seen the LOL I wanted to use, but luckily, the LOLs are tagged. I selected the "Nom Nom Nom" category, and after scrolling for a bit, I find it! "Nom de Bloom," a picture of a kitty eating a flower. Tags also helped me when I was looking for a picture to use in my own most recent blog post; I wanted to find the horrific photoshop mess of Ralph Lauren model Filippa Hamilton. So I went to cocoperez.com, where I remembered reading about the controversial photo. I see a post titled, "The Ralph Lauren Backlash Continues!" and, lucky for me, the tags for this blog topic are right above the title. So I click the "Ralph Lauren" tag, and scroll down a big... there's the blog with the picture I was looking for! What if it hadn't been tagged? I would have spent awhile searching through the blog posts until I found it. Same goes for Nom de Bloom. I would have had to search through pages and pages before I would have found it, yet because it was tagged, my search was considerably narrowed!

So perhaps the art of tagging does deserve the big and elaborate name of "folksonomy." Because if it weren't for folksonomy, I would have spent a LOT more time working on my PowerPoint presentation alone... not even thinking about all the other times I make use of the readily-available tags. Thank goodness for folksonomy!