The power of tagging

A seasonal post from me today…

People often ask me why the hell they should bother tagging content? Lot’s of reasons for this and I could sit here and yammer on about tagging, taxonomies and folksonomies etc etc.

Instead of me giving you guys a drawn out explanation I’ll let you do the reading into the theories in your own time, instead I will lend you my real life example of the benefits of tagging in effect.

I’m celebrating Diwali with my family at the moment, Diwali is the festival of light and the celebration of the Hindu new year.

Most of my friends know I love taking pictures or “freezing time” as I call it, anything to sound cool don’t you know :p Anyway Diwali has provided a whole host of Kodak moments and I have been busy snapping away in between meals, eating + snapping! It’s a great way to live, “try it you might like it”.

Yesterday (if I’m not mistaken) I uploaded some photo’s of tea lights on to my flickr account. Tea lights are lit in the morning and in the evening as part of the rituals/celebrations.

I tagged my photos on flickr with a single tag “Diwali”, this was me being lazy as I am appalling at tagging my pics. Today I got an email from a content editor/journo asking if my pics could be used in an article about Diwali along with other pics from around the world.

Naturally I was happy to let them use my snaps and the article can be found here

The website is called Now Public “crowd powered media”, Now Public pulls together public generated content around topics and asks asset owners to add their own commentary.

The comments all work together to form a nice collaborative article, whilst the assets (video & photo) are all mashed together using some kind of ajax thingamabob to form a really slick slide show.

I’m really liking the concept of Now Public, it is a good example of a website that is utilising public collaboration, social media and UGC. Rock on!

Now where did I leave those spring rolls and the rest of those Indian sweets