Social Bookmarking is often called tagging or a tagging system. While tagging is an important part of a social bookmarking system, it can cause confusion to say they are the same thing. The wikipedia offers many definitions for tags within eight categories from sports to personal identifiers. The relevant one here is “Tag (metadata), a keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information.”
The wikipedia defines social bookmarking as “a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.” It goes on to add,” Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags.” So tags are an important component to most social bookmarking systems but they are just one component and tags are not limited to social bookmarking. Social Bookmarking helped make tagging popular so they are often called tagging systems and the act of using one is often called tagging. Now social bookmarking has moved beyond the internet to move inside the enterprise through tools such as Connectbeam. At the same time, more and more other tools are allowing for tagging as they realize its benefits.
Going to the full definition of tags (metadata) in Wikipedia, we find that, “Tagging was popularized by websites associated with Web 2.0 and is an important feature of many Web 2.0 services. It is now also part of some desktop software.”
This widespread use of tags beyond social bookmarking, while providing an added benefit within these systems, has the potential to create multiple silos of tags within the enterprise. This issue is one that we are working on and I will be writing more about it in the coming weeks.
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