Get the most out of This Week (and the wider web) using ‘tags’.

You may already be familiar with ‘tags’ from other websites and e-newsletters, but if not, take a moment to find out more about how useful they are.

You’ve probably noticed the ‘tag cloud’ on the right-hand side of the This Week homepage, and the word ‘Tags’, followed by one or more hyperlinked words and phrases like ‘Alumni’, ‘Jubilee’ or ‘Health and wellbeing’, at the end of each article.

Tags are a form of metadata, or data about data, that became popular during the recent phase of web and information design commonly described as Web 2.0, and will play a major role in the what is being called the ‘semantic web‘ aspect of Web 3.0 – the next phase of online information provision that hope to standardise  the way data is organised and categorised. So using tags in our publication and encouraging their use more widely on campus is a way for us to not only reflect a widely-used, best practice standard, but also help prepare for the web environment of the future.

You can use tags as This Week’s index. After reading a story on a certain topic, click a tag links (either from the bottom of an article, or from the tag cloud on the homepage) to be shown all the stories that have previously been tagged as relevant to that topic, to catch up on some stories that you might have missed first time around.

Happy exploring!