Everything is a tag

We were developing tag functionality in our products and our product team came up with a mantra about it. Our company products included message boards (also called discussion boards, forums, and referred to as chat in the UK), blogs, idea sharing tools, and file libraries.

The mantra recommended that tag functionality be applied at the discussion level. For blogs, this meant on the blog post, for message boards this meant entire threads. I believe this mantra stemmed from how tagging made sense in the idea tool and the file tool, or perhaps because of how it needed to apply to blogs.

This got under my skin a bit. Threads on message boards can get tremendously long. What if a tag, let's say "fish" was applied to a discussion, how could a user figure out why that tag had been applied? It seemed logical then to say that our mantra was wrong--for message boards at least, the tag should be applied at the message level.

As I mulled this over, I started having more thoughts on the topic, and I started seeing tags differently. Tags are bookmarks if you will. Means by which users can apply a keyword to an object on the Internet, be it a Youtube video, a blog post, or a message on a message board.

One day I performed a google search for something and the result that intrigued me linked to Wikipedia. None of this was unusual, I probably search on Google 20+ times a day at least, and of the results, Wikipedia comes up in the top ten almost every time. That I clicked on a link to Wikipedia wasn't really shocking either, I regularly, let's say 5-10 times a week, follow links to Wikipedia and get my information there.

I love Wikipedia and what it stands for. What a notion--to pull data from a centralized and multilingual meme repository. Sheer genius!

It comes as no surprise to me that my view on tagging changed on Wikipedia. In fact, it seems appropriate at this time for me to link to the Wikipedia page on tags. It was in Wikipedia, and only heaven knows what I was looking up at the time, that I realized that within a message itself, there needed to be tagging. Because of prolific posters who manage to type really long messages such as myself, it might become difficult for a user, following tags for "fish" to figure out why that tag had been applied at the message level. Tags need to be applied at the content level (within the message).

When I typed "Everything is a tag" as a subject, I might have wanted to tag the word "tag" for example. The data itself, all-inclusive is where tags belong. This is a critical failure in most social media tools I see today, with the possible exception of Wikipedia. While they don't permit tagging persay, they allow hyperlinks within the posts. While most social media tools do this as well, this is only tagging in the context of wikis and only when the links point to additional wiki pages. Perhaps I am wrong in thinking that this should serve as a means of tagging, but it is where the idea struck me.

So what do you think? Do you like tags? Do you think that metadata is overkill? Do you believe tags belong at the content level? Sound off!