Center for REALTOR® Technology Web Log

At this time of year, it is appropriate to both reflect back on 2005 and look forward to 2006. One great thing about technology is that it is constantly changing. If you are one of those that is looking forward to a time when it will all stabilize, well dream on. Search Engines have become a fixture on the Internet, but the space will be experiencing pressure. Pressure is a good thing because it drives innovation. I thought I would look at one creative application in the web world that is very intriguing called Tagging.

Everyone is reasonably familiar with bookmarks (I hope!). You simply organize places on the web you want to remember in a folder-like structure and they are there when you need them again. If you have a lot of folders, the trick is to remember where you stored the bookmark. Tagging is a way to not only store your bookmarks, but to annotate them with descriptors and share the results with others.

Let’s examine how tagging works in everyday life. Let’s say you have bookmarked the CRT blog in a folder called “Technology”. You did this because the blog has geek humor, articles on mapping and announcements on ezRETS. The rest of the material (sadly) you are not interested in. With the Bookmark Management built into your browser, you then add keywords to the bookmark like “humor”, “ezRETS”, “technology” and “CRT”. Great, at least now you won’t have to remember where you filed it and you call recall the bookmark later with search functions.

If you would like to share the sites you have found with others, you can now e-mail the URLs. Wait a second, there is something wrong here. Helpful tools were used to categorize and organize my life and to share it with others I have to result to e-mail? The explosion of blogs was due to a similar problem; e-mail newsletters just had to go. You probably want a better way to share you efforts so let’s introduce del.icio.us. A weird name, but wonderful concept.

Not only can I share my tagged Internet, but I can search other people’s work as well. Instead of entering keywords into a search engine like Google, you enter keywords into del.icio.us and search other people tags (or enhanced bookmarks). Don’t worry, others are not searching the bookmarks on your browser, just those you choose to expose. This is very cool if you think about it, so please pause for a moment and reflect. You are searching how others view the web, not how the search engines saw the pages.

In a followup post, I’ll present a step-by-step introduction to del.icious.us but if you don’t want to wait for that post, explore tagging yourself. It is very intuitive. BTW, my tags are available through del.icio.us as “mlesswing”. This seems like information out of the blue, but if get ahead of the next article, you will find it handy.