Tagging Turns Two

Technorati announced tagging just two years ago! I found it hard to believe that tagging is only two years old. But on the web, I guess two is much longer than I think.

“Tags are a simple, yet powerful, social software innovation. Today millions of people are freely and openly assigning metadata to content and conversations. Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that people dislike, the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives leads to a rich and discoverable folksonomy. Intelligence is provided by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy outperforms more structured approches to classification”
– Technorati’s Tag Announcement two years ago.

Tagging revolutionized the web with it’s take on organizing information. Now, instead of categories, some sites are just using tags. Instead of folders, places like Flickr organize in tags. It’s one, almost universal, language. The only sticking spot is Google and their labels. Same thing, different name.

Technorati was one of the first big players in the tagging revolution. Now today, most blogging platforms, along with most social sites, support Technorati tags and they are being adopted more and more each day.

To celebrate, Technorati has re-worked the tag pages to give more information from a variety of social sites. A quick look at the Apple tag page, you’ll see stories from blogs along with photos, videos, music and podcasts tagged with Apple.

Tagging sure has come a long way in two years and it’s beeing adopted by almost all types of digital media. It just goes to show you how far one good idea can go.