IDEA 20090326 Future of Tagging

This is an writing that worldlabel.com has sponsored me to make, but is free from editorial control. It will be about what tags are, the physical origin of tags, up until now with virtual tags and modernization of how tags are produced.

Definition of Tagging
Why is this important?

Tagging is becoming increasingly important in a world where information travels at the speed of thought. By allowing humans and machines to better understand information, tags become a gateway, as technological advances change the way we experience the world around us.

Quick History of Tagging
Today, tagging is often associated with the World wide web, but it’s important to note the physical origins of tagging. As tags are, at their most basic, elements that are used in identification and representation, we can begin by examining the history of written communication. Mesopotamia houses the birth of recorded communication. As early as 8000 BCE, while civilization was making the transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a more sedentary agricultural one, groups were trying to find methods of recording transactions and trades between other groups. Clay ball-shaped envelopes, called bullea, housed up to 16 uniquely shaped tokens. These tokens were representative of different economical classes (grain, oil, sheep, etc.). The physical tokens were eventually gradually eliminated in favor of simply recording the shapes on clay tablets.

Symbols and Writing
The earliest known writing system in the world appears in 3300 BCE. Cuneiform script first emerged in the Sumerian Civilization, located in southern Iraq. It was based on the clay bullae Mesopotamian accounting system. While the script began as a series of pictograms, it evolved into symbols organized into horizontal rows.

The first step towards an alphabet was taken when Egyptian-adjusted hieroglyphs fused phonetic characters with images representing a spoken sound. Early Greek and Classic Roman alphabets formed the basis of Renaissance Humanist scripting that incorporated capital and lower-case letters. It was during this time, around 1450, that Johann Gutenberg developed the first system for automated writing with his press. As the process of recording became infinitely easier, a cultural explosion occurred.

Signs
European Trade Guilds began using logos and branding practices to convey information about the products they distributed, including origin and content. Peter Behrens developed a branding strategy for AEG in 1907 that united the company’s print materials, products, and architecture through design elements, resulting in the first comprehensive corporate identity design. Corporate identity design is important to consider because it uses physical objects and ideas to help people understand and categorize a company.

Graffiti
Farther along, in the 20th century, tagging became a commonly used tern in graffiti. A tag, to a graffiti artist, is his or her personalized signature or calling card. Tags often contain cryptic messages or subtle imagery. Opponents of graffiti may use tagging to represent all hand-style forms of the stylized writing.

Virtual Tagging
In a virtual sense, tagging is a relatively recent idea. Tags, as metadata, are keywords or terms that are assigned to pieces of information. Virtual tags can help identify and describe data so that it can be easily categorized and located through browsing or specific searches.

One of the first consumer products to include tagging or annotations was the Lotus Magellan, which was developed by Bill Gross and the Lotus Development Corporation in 1988. Running under DOS, Magellan could scan a file system in a hard drive or a floppy disk and create an index of the data that existed there. Fuzzy searching, Magellan’s most exciting feature, connected files based on relative frequency of words. This allowed users to organize similar sets of data.

It wasn’t until Del.icio.us, in 2003, that tagging in a virtual sense became a mainstream concept. Delicious is a social bookmarking service that can be used to store, share, and discover web bookmarks. It’s collective nature, makes the free service ideal for users to view websites of other like-minded users. Delicious paved the way for tagging in blog posts. Terms, defined by the author, that are relevant to a particular post are assigned as tags for that post. In this way, posts can be organized and listed alongside other posts that relate in fundamental ways.

HTML
Building elements of HTML are called tags as well. HTML tags provide a way to give meaning to a body of information. The tags can be given additional attributes to further describe and categorize them.