Long before the whole idea of blogging became the hot way to share you thoughts about just about anything in the world tags and tagging were worlds best associated with games played by children in the schoolyard or in the corner park. Then along came the whole idea of blogs and the way it gave us to write about our world and our lives.

In the beginning though it was at most a solitary exercise with maybe just friends and family reading them. No thought was really given to the fact that a couple of words could be used as a common word to provide conversation keywords on a larger scale so that other blogs around the world could participate in a larder conversion beyond their own little world. After all the whole purpose of blogging; or at least a major part of it and tags gave us that window into the larger blogosphere conversation. It also is a great way to find new bloggers worthy of adding to your blog roll.

So how do tags work?

Well for the blog writer it is a simple way to create a list of keywords that can be considered to identify the idea, content and people you talk about in a post. For example the tags for this post could be something like this:

Conversation Tags: blogging, bloggers, tags, tagging

Now behind the scenes you need as blog search engine that will grab the post contents and then associate it with any of the tags provided in the post. So for example if you were to search a blog search engine that supports the tagging system - such a Technorati - and you used any one of the tags supplied Technorati would return search results what have a greater emphasis on one; or all, of the tags you have added to the post.

That said blogging is not the only technology that could make good use of tagging as it would have a better chance of return results more coherent to what your question was. This was one of the reasons when I heard that Thunderbird (email client from Mozilla) was going to support tagging I couldn’t download it quick enough only to be disappointed with the implementation. All that had done was rename the “Flagged items” into a tag like structure. For me this was the wrong idea and went against the prime reason for using tags.

This same feeling was equally prominent when I heard that WordPress was going to institute their own version of tagging. Instead they have defeated the whole purpose of tags being used to encourage conversation outside of your own blog. Tags were the powerful glue that allowed us to include a larger part of the community to partake within a conversation even if they weren’t the one to start it. For me the WordPress implementation was flawed and did nothing to help a blogger grow by finding other blogs talking about the same thing. The moment tags became a pat of the default WordPress way of doing things they cut the outward conversation off at the knees.

But tags don’t need to just be the realm of blogging as there are other programs that could easily use tags to make the user experience more productive if the program had a way to communicate and share based on using tags as keyword indicators within there receiving and sending of data. This idea became a sound thought during an email conversation I had with Deva from ClearContext - especially considering how they want to be able to deal with email information management.

As with the system we now know as RSS and invented by Dave Winder simplicity of managing information doesn’t always need complex methods to achieve an end - sometimes the simplest thing/idea/concept can yield the best results. To which nothing gets easier - especially from the user point of view, the more complicated you make the process of getting and managing that information.

But with tags nothing is easier than adding a few keywords as part of an email to open a vast new world of being able to collaborate with nothing less that a few key words added to the end of the email.

Sometimes simplicity is truly the best way to create a groundbreaking way to enhance and improve our communications.

Listening to: Mind.In.A.Box - Lost Alone - Lost Alone 2

Conversation Tags: blogging, bloggers, tags, tagging