Tags

I was familiar with the concept of article indexing long before I started library school. I've been using some form of "blogging tool" since about 2001. In 2001, the software and options available were fairly basic. I remember wishing that there was some way to search your blog for past posts, or give what I thought of as subjects to posts so they were easily searchable. It got really frustrating to remember writing something, and the only way to find it again was to try to remember when it was written.

At some point along the way, these various tools (I've been on LiveJournal, Blogspot and Typepad) began offering the option to "label" "tag" each post. I first noticed this in 2005, while reading some more professional blogs--they all seemed to have these subject clouds. I had no idea what they were until I clicked on one of the words and up popped all the posts labeled, or "tagged" with those words. From then on, I found tagging on blogs a very useful tool and have tried to use them thoughtfully and consistently.

When in my first library science class (The Organization of Information), and got to the indexing unit, I realized that I'd already been indexing my own blog content for years and had discovered some of the issues surrounding indexing on my own. This made me understand and appreciate the topic (particularly as it relates to controlled vocabularies) much better than I otherwise would have.