- Benefit 1: Facilitating Collaboration
- Benefit 2: Obtaining Descriptive Metadata
- Benefit 3: Enhancing Findability
- Benefit 4: Increasing Participation
- Benefit 5: Identifying Patterns
- Benefit 6: Augmenting Existing Classification Efforts
- Benefit 7: Sparking Innovation
- One More Thing: Align Your Efforts
Benefit 7: Sparking Innovation
You might not think of tagging as a source of innovation, but an interesting pattern consistently emerges in systems that provide both tags and data feeds. Data feeds are a way to pull information out of your tagging system. When you architect your tagging system to provide a data feed for every single tag, you’ve created a basic read-write system for your application.
Users can write data through tagging, and they can extract it by using a data feed. Interestingly, this approach has created many innovative tagging mash-ups and services. Geotagging—using tags to assign latitude and longitude coordinates to resources—began as a simple set of tagging conventions and a system that used data feeds to grab that geographic data and place it on a map.
Tagging systems that provide data feeds for their tags often get the benefit of user-generated innovation.