Defined Tags – Zigtag makes tags semantic Part 1 of 2

What makes Zigtag unique among the many bookmarking solutions available?  It’s our defined tags – that is, tags that have meaning.  Here’s an example:

This is a screen shot of the Zigtag sidebar.  Here, we’re browsing a page about Apple Inc., and we want to tag the page with “Apple”.  But which Apple do we mean?  There are quite a few to choose from – the company, the fruit, the music album called “Apple”, or “Apple records”, to name a few.  Mousing over any of these choices provides a description of that tag so that you can make an informed decision of which one to choose.

Now you may think “well I will only ever tag with one tag called ‘Apple’, because I’m never going to tag something about the fruit”.  I must admit that when I started tagging, I never thought I’d have this problem, but it’s amazing how often you come across it.  For example, being a programmer and a guitar player, I often tag things with “Tabs” to refer to a tabbed interface, and “Tabs” to refer to a guitar tablature.  Being a science nut, I often tag things about neurology with “Memory”, and things about RAM with “Memory”.  In my own tag space, I’ve got about 20 examples where Zigtag’s defined tags help me clean up my tag space beautifully.

If you’re still not convinced, consider this: what if you’re using a bookmarking application for research, and looking at other people’s tags?  How do you know the intended definition of a particular tag? As an example, head to http://del.icio.us/tag/tabs.  It’s a big cluster of two different types of “tabs” – guitar tabs and UI tabs.

Zigtag has over 2 million defined tags in the system, and that number is growing every day.  You can even submit new defined tags here (eventually this will be a community process of adding defined tags – right now this goes into a queue and we’ll approve them eventually).

There’s lots more to know about defined tags, coming in the next couple days.  Stay tuned.