Surfers use tagging to make sense of the online sprawl

A report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 28% of web users are organizing their information using tagging. According to Wikipedia a tag is "a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (like picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information it is applied to.”
Tagging is used to organize photos on Yahoo, Flickr, del.icio.us and YouTube.

It has both an organizational function, and a social one. Being able to mark, store and retrieve content using personalized keywords and descriptions enables users to form their own search terms, and by finding similar tags they can find communities or individuals who hold similar interests and content.

So who is tagging? Pew found that they are likely to be well paid, educated, early adopters, under the age of 40.

A .pdf of the report can be found here.

Tags: flickr, Pew, search, tagging