CNN.com – ‘Tagging’ helps unclutter data – May 3, 2005

Interesting to read an article about ‘tagging’ in the maintstream media. I find myself reading articles like this and saying to myself: HELLO! It’s called CATALOGING! Whether you want to think of it that way or not, that’s basically what tagging is all about. A very very simplified version of cataloging, to be sure, but still, it’s cataloging. I find it frustrating that those in other areas, even other branches of library and information science, think they’ve invented something “new” and “cool” when the library realm has dealt with this issue for what, 100 (or more) years?!

Statements like “Tagging is fundamentally about tapping the collective human wisdom” just seem silly in the context of what libraries have done for so long.

This is not to criticize tagging itself, which I think is an interesting and useful development. For people who use tagging, good for them.