Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Websites of mass description (27 Sep 2005) More importantly, though, tags allow Flickr and other sites that rely on them to harness the social power of the web. Give users the option to make their content public, and the ability to search everyone else's content for a given tag, and a world of possibilities opens up. As thousands of users tag photographs and web pages, information begins to percolate in new ways. Users themselves build a database of what is useful and important for others to draw upon. For example, a search for the tag “love” on Flickr brings up almost 20,000 photos that encapsulate people's idea of love. Article URL: http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4368074 Read 80 more articles from Economist sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers          Books about Usability | Information Architecture | Information Visualisation | Technology History This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy