This post title is taken from an inspiring article by David Weinberger. It perfectly explains the relevance of tags in marketing 2.0. I wanna start by giving this to you as a gift. And as an acknowledgement to David for his precious work! I won’t add one more word, here it is:

A tag is a little thing. A word, or maybe two. But the rise of tags carries big implications, precisely because tags are so small. The excitement about them goes far beyond their practical utility. They announce a fundamental change in how we think our world is ordered - and who gets to do the ordering. At bottom, the importance of tags is political.
At their simplest, tags are labels readers apply to what they have found and want to re-find later. So, if you come across, say, a recipe for apply curry, you might tag it “apple,” “curry,” “main course,” “Indian,” and “medium spicy.” I might encounter the same web page and tag it “foreign food,” “low calorie,” and because my tolerance for curry is low, “extra spicy.” Someone else might tag it “fruit” or “disgusting.” We would do this tagging at a site such as http://del.icio.us, the page that began the current interest in tagging. Del.icio.us is a bookmarking site where people can keep lists of pages that they want to remember. As we accumulate hundreds or thousands of pages, del.icio.us lets us find all the ones we’ve tagged a particular way. So, with a mouse click, we can find all the pages we’ve tagged as “extra spicy” or “apple.” This is the basic utilitarian function of tags. They are convenient, but not much more.
But del.icio.us also lets us see what pages everyone else at the site has tagged. So, we can find all the pages anyone using the service has tagged “curry” and “low calorie.” Suddenly, we are benefiting from the discoveries others have made. Subscribe to a tag such as “plastics” or “environment,” and now every day in your email inbox you’ll receive a list of pages tagged that way by others. It is like having the world do your research for you.
That is more than a matter of convenience. It brings you information and ideas you simply would not have discovered otherwise. It makes groups smarter. Sometimes they are groups of strangers, as at Del.icio.us, and sometimes they are groups spread across a particular organization, as at companies adopting tagging software from IBM, ConnectBeam, and others.
But to see why tagging is a matter of the politics of knowledge, we have to look at the context into which tagging has erupted.

We have argued for millennia about how our world is ordered. Is homosexuality a disease? Was the slaughter of American Indians genocide? Is the platypus a mammal? Is Pluto a planet? We have assumed that there is an order and that everything has its place in it. This makes sense when talking about arranging physical objects: If an underwater digital camera arrives in your store, you’ll have to decide whether you’re going to shelve it with the cameras or with the sports equipment. It can only have one place because that’s how physical objects work. Likewise, when you put away your laundry, you have to decide whether this pair of socks goes with your business clothing or your informal clothing. It can’t go in both places.
Since our knowledge has been preserved and communicated in physical objects - usually made of paper - we’ve had to devise informational orders that assign each a single place. So, the librarian has to decide if the new book on fruit curries goes with the Indian recipe books, the health recipe books, or the “just arrived” books.
The same limitations of the physical also determine what gets published in the first place. Paper is expensive and it takes up room, so book publishers have to choose only a relative few works to publish. Newspapers hire editors to decide what will be in each day’s edition, and which items will make it onto the front page. There can only be one front page, the same for all readers, because atoms are too expensive to personalize.
So, an entire structure of authority has grown up based on the scarcity of the physical conveyances of knowledge. Experts winnow and arrange, based on what they think will be interesting and importance to us. Generally they do their job well. But they are still doing it for us. They have authority and power.
We benefit from their advice, but we also pay a price. The day’s newspaper simply cannot represent the interests of all its readers. Most of us skip most of what’s in it, and we don’t see the articles that didn’t make the cut that we might have found fascinating. The same is true for every other one-to-many medium. And, worse, we suffer a terrible sense of alienation from our own culture because this culture is something done to us. Our choices are not only limited, they are limited by faceless others. We often like what we read or watch, of course, but still what we’re viewing is theirs.
With tagging, the power over significance changes hands. Rather than the author, publisher or librarian telling us what matters and why it matters, the readers now do. We stick a tag on it. The book that our teacher, librarian, publisher or even author marks as “classic,” we may mark as “boring.” The official photo of a politician his campaign has tagged as “leadership” we may tag “poseur.” In fact, thousands of readers may create hundreds of different tags, each meaningful to the individual taggers.
From this might come chaos. But instead order often emerges. Some tags get used more than others and they may be used with other tags in patterns that can be surfaced. The order that emerges bottom-up from a set of tags is called a “folksonomy,” a play in English on “taxonomy.” Folksonomies express how a group of people think about a domain. They are almost always looser, messier and less hierarchical than the sorts of taxonomies built by experts who are trying to express the order of their domain. But that also means that folksonomies can capture more of the relationships the group finds among the various elements around them.
In fact, we now have evidence that as tagging sets get bigger, they do not necessarily get more chaotic. Search for photos tagged “capri” at the popular photo-sharing site Flickr.com, and you will be asked if you want to browse among photos of the island or photos of the Ford car by that name. The groupings are surprisingly accurate, and they are based on nothing but a statistical analysis of the tags used on those photos.
This is meaning we get for free. People tag photos at Flickr and Web pages at del.icio.us - and books at Amazon and LibraryThing, and academic articles at CitULike.com and household possessions at MyThings.com - so they can find them again, but these individual actions create something bigger than a single-person retrieval system. Each tag adds meaning to the shared Web. Meanings are both intensely personal and deeply shared. That is why people have fallen in love at del.icio.us with people who share tags with them. That is why a tag cloud - a visual representation of the tags one most often uses - can be such a telling indicator of one’s interests and desires.
The short term importance of tags is that they enable us to manage large collections of resources, and they let us share what we find. The long term importance is that they add a layer of human-generated meaning that we will be able to farm and build on in ways we haven’t yet imagined. The deeper meaning is that they prove that we do not need experts providing single, unambiguous structures of order to keep chaos at bay. Rather, we can live with multiple orders, each enriching our world.

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