Tagging Tutorials — Part I Flickr

My next few posts will deal with tagging on different social networking sites. This first tutorial will focus on Flickr.

In all the social networking sites that you might post to, there is something in common–tagging. Simply put, tags are little pieces of data that let people know what your information–whether it be an image, a video, or text–is about. For example, you could tag a picture of the castle in Warwick, UK on Flickr with "Warwick castle UK England" and when someone searched on these criteria would have the following results returned:

Click on me: [warwick castle UK England]

Who can tag on Flickr?

  1. First you need an account. If you already have a Yahoo! account, then you can sign up quickly using that account.
  2. After logging in you can tag a) your own photos b) photos of those who have set you up as a contact c) photos of those who are in the same group as you

How do you tag on Flickr?

  1. Log in
  2. Go to photos you are allowed to tag
  3. Look on the right side, you should see the current tags of photos
  4. Click on "Add a tag". If your tag is more than one word, use quotes around the tag.

How does tagging benefit you?

Tagging allows others, like on the Nonprofits in Second Life site, to pull in images–see the Flickr badge on the left–from all sorts of people who have chosen to use the same tag. It also allows Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds of that content that can pull in like images to a web page or to a RSS aggregator like Netvibes. Tagging allows your pictures to be found.

The tag being used for Nonprofits in Second Life is "NPSL."

Written by: Creech