Metadata and Tagging

The three readings assigned were all surprisingly interesting and yet informative. In chapter 4 of Research Strategies the author Badke explained metadata and it’s capability to retrieve information you need at the moment you want. His detailed explanation on “controlled vocabularies” helped me become a better information retriever. The passage Folksonomy: A Game of High-tech (and High-stakes) Tag has taught me the concept of tagging is a growing fast like the next big thing. Many companies see the potential it has in business, i.e. “Yahoo! is already surfing the Folksonomy wave thanks to two critical 2005 purchases of Flickr and del.icio.us.”  The final article written by Horatia Harrod talks about the success of Flickr, the world’s leading photo-sharing site, and how it came to be. The three articles are tied together by the string called metadata. Each reading, in their own way, explain and showed how metadata works.