Tagging – a good thing or a bad thing?

Tagging is very popular among people now, but is it really good to use tagging? We can see people using tagging in different websites or computer systems such as Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, etc.

I think all of you know the advantages of using tagging. For instance, it is very convenient to search things by use tagging. You can simply get what you want in a huge database by just typing in a keyword or a label. Flickr is a very good example of it. When you type in a word, e.g. blog, you can get different pictures tagging “blog”. They may be pictures of a real blog, blog headers shared by people or even a picture to promote bloggers’ newly developed blog! They can be anything that is tagged “blog”. When I work on different projects and need pictures to support, I would fully appreciate tagging as it saves my time to get the pictures I want. Here is a screen capture when I use Flickr to search "blog".

However, things always have two sides, good and also bad one. Tagging is good about its convenience, but also bad about its convenience! I think most of you use Facebook now and like uploading photos on Facebook. Would you use the tagging system of Facebook to tag your friends in some photos? Frankly, I sometimes hate this system. When I am tagged in a photo that is uploaded by my friends, I cannot set the privacy of it. I have no control of these photos shown on my page! You may say that I can simply remove the tag, so it will not be on my page. But! I may not have time to keep checking my Facebook all the time. Before you remove the tag, your friends may have taken a look of it already! When you don’t want others to view some photos, you have no control of them. How frustrated it is!