You: Tags you say? Give me an example, explain with some cool metaphor to real life, then how I can use it to make my life easer.

Coffee Master: You got it. Hows about a picture,

Tag (Wikipedia Definition) : A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (e.g. a picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information.

Tag (My Definition): It is the internet’s manila envelope, with way more features than the dead tree version. Want to categorize your photos by who is in them, add tags of peoples names. Want to organize the same info into multiple categories, add several tags to each piece of info.

I think of tags like that scene from matrix where neo says “We need guns, lots of guns” and whoosh, they all appear. But what if he wanted only semi auto, 9mil submachine guns? Here is an interesting distinction. In the digital world, there is no cost to move things around, or have the same thing appear in multiple places. So those guns could be organized by caliber, or Neo could change his mind, and organize it by how fast the guns could shoot. Within the time he could think of the category of guns, they could be arranged accordingly (or if you prefer, wooshed into existence with cool animation).

I wish I could tag everything in my life like this. My book case looks like it is organized by a schizophrenic anal retentive librarian, never being able to decide if books should be color coordinated, alphabetical, topic, or organized from most frequently used, to those collecting dust.

So we had the description, cool metaphor, now for the application.Think of projects you have worked on before. Are on a team of 3 people designing a cool new phone (heard of any recently?). Then, suddenly, a new person comes on to help with the specs. If you were using email to do the project, you have to sift through each one, bla bla bla. If you were using wikis or blogs or google docs, and had tagged documents according to what was in them, what they pertained to, it would be a simple matter of having the new guy subscribe to those tags, and BOOM, he would have the most current info. Then your boss walks in, and asks to see the latest schematic, you happen to have tagged each of the latest schematics with the tag, you guessed it, schematic + codeword for latest version. Or if it was a blog format, you would see the updates reverse chronologically (recent first).