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.

Facebook is an incredibly popular piece of social networking software, which is used all over the world. However, it has come under criticism for many controversial aspects of its layout and usage. For example, extracting your profile from the social network is something which is actually surprisingly difficult; this is because when you choose to delete your account, the default option is to actually "deactivate" it; if you don't untick this box, then your profile is not completely taken offline and deleted, but it is only your public profile taken down; this is supposed to make it easy for you to return, as you don't have to put up your information all over again. Also, the relative openness of Facebook means that employers can trawl for "digital dirt" on sites such as Facebook.

The web is an incredibly powerful and versatile tool; however, it is also extremely open. This is, however, something that people often forget - that whatever you publish on the internet, be that blogs, or anything, has an invisible audience: one which you do not, and cannot know about. But as people often forget about his, and publish aspects of their lives which they might not want potentially anyone to read. This makes the web something which can also be relatively dangerous; chatrooms, for example, can be accessed by anyone, and was how many paedophiles groomed their victims. Although this is a very extreme and rare case, there are other more common examples of the lack of web privacy; on Facebook, for example, if you are part of the London network, your profile can be viewed by anyone on that network, which currently has over 5 MILLION profiles.

Standard blogging is extremely popular, and is growing at an incredible rate. However, microblogging is a form of blogging which is becoming increasingly popular across the world. The concept of microblogging is that where you write short sentences which describe what you are doing at any given point in time. The problem with "proper" blogging sites such as blogger is that they are designed to hold longer posts (such as what I am writing now), which is inconvenient if you want to write something short and snappy. Probably the most used microblogging site is Twitter, although Facebook and other similar applications have microblogging elements in them. Microblogs can be easily updated, and now sites like Twitter are available on your phone, they can be looked at and updated almost anywhere in the world. Celebrities like Stephen Fry are increasingly using Twitter, as it is an extremely convenient form of blogging.

This blog covers wikis other than Wikipedia; this is by far the most used of wikis, and most people don't even know that other wikis exist. The three that I am going to talk about are as follows; the Science Museum wiki is a wiki created by the Science Museum. The website contains information about objects held in the museum’s public collections, but is extremely limited in it's content; clicking the random page link for a short amount of time will bring you back to pages you have already visited. However, the information is editable and expandable; expansion is encouraged, with links to edit pages easily available. The second wiki is called ThinkWiki, a wiki dedicated to a series of notebooks called Lenovo Thinkpads. It contains useful information on drivers and patches, HOWTO's (installation, information recovery etc.), hardware and other information. There is, however, not a great deal of textual information on this wiki; instead, there are more programs, applications and add-ons. The third and final wiki I am looking at was created by The Auburn School University of Architecture. This Wiki serves to protect the delicate Collaborative environment of Design studio culture, and to serve as a protocol and reference guide to keep these balances in check.