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Finding the Interesting Stuff with Tags

As people continue to tag items on websites, it starts to create something similar to categories only much more specific in manner. Before tags, bloggers and website developers lumped content into categories. Readers would then be able to sift through that category to find what they were looking for.

Tags allow much more specific categorization and thus allow people to search more effectively. When a substential base of tags is created on a site, people can zero in more closely on the content of their choice. A good tag base saves people time by pinpointing what they are loking for.

Sites using tags often provide a tag cloud, or a group of tags that are popular on that site. The tags in the tag cloud are usually varied in font size. The larger, more prominent words are tags that have the most content entries associated with that tag word, within the site.

The nature of tags and the dynamic content they describe means that they are flexible and user oriented, and therefore associated with sites boasting Web 2.0, which is the new generation of internet, relying more on user-friendly, dynamic methods of presenting information.

For many sites using tags as a method of categorization, the site's users are not limited to one person's point of view regarding a particular subject. Some websites allow their visitors to assign their own tags to materials within the site. The more often people tag a particular item, the more diverse the tags become, and discovering that item becomes more likely when someone does a search. Not every website allows users to tag items. In the case of blogs, the tagging is up to the blog owner.

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