Sifry’s Elevator Pitch for Tagging

I talked about elevator pitches the other day because it’s important to be able to articulate quickly and convincingly about what you’re doing. Dave Sifry of Technorati gives an elevator pitch for tagging in a recent post:

“So what’s a tag? Simple. It is a simple user-generated category for something. Technorati wasn’t the first to catch onto the idea of tagging – sites like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Furl were already doing it when we jumped in. Simply put, tags make it easier to self-organize the web.”

I’ve only recently thought about the relationship of tags and categories. If the only difference is that tags are user-generated, then I’m all for it. Makes it easy talk about, at least. I think it is important to note, however, that tagging is done over time, not once in the beginning like many other categorizations are. Read Sifry’s full post.