How Blogs use Tags to Communicate

Probably the least understood "Web 2.0" social categorizing technology is the tag. Tagging of blog articles, web pages and other formats of rapidly updated content is one of the ways that audiences can create the material they want to see on the web.

Tags are really nothing more than a distributed categorizing system which takes advantage of large readerships to refine the keywords under which a particular article or video will be made available to other audience members. The larger the audience, the more accurate tags become, because a particular namespace of tags is really an instant poll of all the readers of a particular article. The more readers tag an article a particular way, by definition the more accurate those tags become.

Tags are very important to sites with large amounts of content because they make it much easier for readers to find what they are interested in. This is made even easier by blog features like tag clouds and popular tag lists.