The word "tag" has many different meanings (32 on dictionary.com), but a new meaning and use for the word has arisen in modern life; tagging on the world wide web. The traditional way of ordering information was through strict categorisation, or taxonomy. This is, for example, how information used to be stored in archives, how it is stored in libraries etc. It is very slow to navigate, and often needs experts to actually find anything. However, a new method of ordering data, called folksonomy (a term coined by the information expert Thomas Vander Wal) has emerged from the internet, and tagging is at the forefront of this information revolution.

Tagging is where information - this might be videos on youtube, bookmarks on del.i.cious, articles on Wikipedia etc. - is given an identifiable "tag". This means that search engines which have the capability of finding these "tags", can do so. This is the secret behind the awesome power of Google and other search engines. This is why you can find information so quickly on the internet. It was not something that was created by information experts, but by people like you and me, who put information on the web. It is a democratic, free process.

Flicker, like a lot of hugely successful internet programs, was created by an accident of sorts. Born out of the game Neverending, a program which published photo sharing software which developed to overtake the original site, Flickr is now a massive online community were you can share photos with the world or just your friends. Flickr has recently claimed it has reached the 3 billion mark in its number of photos, and there are a massive variety of photos posted on the site. With all these photos, many extremely personal, you might think that privacy would be a major issue on the site. However, unlike Facebook, this doesn't seem to be the case; you can claim rights on the photos you post, and can decide whether you want the photo to be public, which means anyone trawling through the site can see it, or private, which means that only your friends can see them.

Photos can also be tagged, and so are more easily searchable; for example, if you want your photo to be found if anyone typed up "landscapes" on the Flickr search bar, you can tag your photo "landscapes". Various information compilation services and tools have also been created.

Facebook is a much more open and less private social network than people think; an example is that if when a London user signs up, he is automatically placed on the Greater London network, which allows anyone within this network to see each other's profiles. However, there are a mass of different privacy settings within Facebook, and most users don't fully use these - an example of this is the public search option; even if you are not signed up to Facebook at all, unless you deselect the public search option, your Facebook profile can be found on Google, or any other search engine.