What’s the smartest way to find stuff on your computer? How about on the internet?

If you answered ‘tagging’ then you’re already ahead of the pack. It’s a modern way of organising data that makes it quick and easy to locate documents, songs, pictures and videos either on a PC or online.

Tagging is taking off so rapidly that older methods, involving folders and search programs, are already fast approaching their use-by date (see ‘Why Tag?’)

Perhaps the biggest attraction of tagging is that it’s extremely simple to use. It speaks your language. You don’t need to be a trained librarian or a major league computer nerd to use it.

When you store a document, song, picture, movie, web page bookmark or any other kind of digital file that you may want to find again in the future, you simply type in a handful of words that describe what you have just stored. These words are the tags. If it helps, think of them as an unlimited supply of labels.

Because you get to choose your own tags, you can pick words that make sense to you personally. This has two advantages: first, personal tags are easier to remember; second, you don’t have to waste time trying to fathom someone else’s mind to figure out how they might tag the data.

You can give each stored item as many tags as you want. In fact, it’s good to use a few tags per item as this makes it easier to find things later.

At this stage an example might help. Remember that digital photo you took at the beach of your friend Sean getting hit on the head with a tennis ball while playing beach cricket? It might have the tags friends, beach, Sean, cricket and ouch! Just add them to the file when you store it.

When you want to find the picture again in the future, you’ll probably be able to track it down by remembering a single tag. Even if you have thousands of photos tagged ‘beach’, remembering one or more other tags will help you zoom in on it in a flash.

Tagging also makes it easy to view all your beach pictures or all your cricket pictures in one place.

Where to tag?

Tagging works best online. Many websites use tags to organise web pages, photos and other information. Some let you tag your stuff and then share it with your friends, family or the entire world.

For example, Flickr (www.flickr.com) is a photo-sharing website you may be familiar with. It allows you to store tagged pictures either privately or publicly. Other people can use tags to find your public images and you can see other people’s pictures that use similar tags. Likewise, YouTube (www.youtube.com) uses tags to help you find videos. Del.icio.us (www.del.icio.us)  provides a similar service for web page bookmarks. It has a nifty feature that suggests automatic tags, making life easier still.

Although Google prefers to call the tags in Gmail (www.gmail.com) ‘labels’, they work just the same as ordinary tags and allow you to organise your emails.

It is also possible to tag items on your computer if you have a newer operating system like Microsoft Windows or Apple’s Mac OSX. Tagging tools are still in their infancy and are likely to improve even further with future releases.

Why tag?

Before tags, people would usually organise computer files by giving each one a meaningful name and then sorting them into folders and sub-folders.

This was based on the way office workers stored paper information in filing cabinets in pre-computer days. Those desktop icons that look like sheets of paper, folders, cabinets and even wastepaper baskets are mainly there to make old people feel comfortable.

Finding files this way wasn’t hard, so long as you remembered where to look, and there weren’t too many folders and files to sort through. Things started to get a bit tricky when people began packing thousands of photos, songs, movies and other documents on their computers, phones, iPods and other devices, and in various online places. Search tools can help, but they generally only look in one place and there’s not much point hunting for text inside songs, photos or movies.

When data collections run to hundreds of gigabytes of storage and many thousands of individual files, it simply isn’t practical to give every one of these a meaningful name, then drag and drop it into a logically organised folder. Conventional searching often delivers too many results to be useful as well.

Mimicking the way an old-fashioned office worked doesn’t make sense when you actually need to organise a library, a record shop, a branch of Blockbuster video and a huge photo collection on your computer. Tagging was developed from the ground up to deal with the way we now use data.