What's a tag or tagging?

A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (a picture, a geographic map, a blog entry, a video clip etc.), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information.

Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by item author/creator or by its consumer/viewers/community. Tags are typically used for resources such as computer files, web pages, digital images, and internet bookmarks.

Defined vs. Undefined

Zigtag allows the owner to not only tag a web page with relavent keywords (also known as undefined tags) but it also allows them to choose defined terms to describe the web page. These are what Zigtag calls defined tags. Defined tags are an integral part of social bookmarking in the future.

Tagging Example

A web page bookmark might have the tags Hockey, Oilers, Tickets, Away Games, and Discounts associated to it. A human reader can probably tell the purpose of the page by quickly scanning the list of tags. Zigtag displays those tags in a list, with each tag displayed as a web link leading to a web page listing all bookmarks which use that tag. This allows a reader to locate quickly all pages which have been associated with the term Oilers. Through tag searching, a reader is able to find all pages that use a particular set of tags, such as Oilers and Tickets.

If the bookmark's owner wishes to reclassify the page, all that is required is for them to change the list of tags. In this case, the author could add the tags NHL, Alberta, Flames, and Paypal to their page. All connections between pages are automatically tracked and updated by Zigtag. There is no need to relocate the page within a complex hierarchy of categories.