HERE are a variety of technique for summarising page content. Excerpts may be considered one of them, metadata in the (X)HTML header might be another. There is also a sharp rise in the use of tags, which can easily infer the ‘theme’ of a page a and can cohesively reflect on trends across sites (confer tag clouds or see image below).

I am discovering more and more services that are beginning to rely on a succinct collection of keyword, much like tags in Technorati, del.icio.us or the new meta search service gada.be. To each page, a concise representation simply gets bound. Prepare for more of that tagging phenomenon to be seen in the future. In its absence, pages become less desirable as they are more bandwidth-consuming.

Contextual tags cloud in July 2005

Finally, and perhaps more interestingly, advertisements in a page can be made more relevant by using tags, having manually embedded them in the page. This avoids advertisement from appearing where they would become a contextual misfit. Thus far, however, I have only come across support for tag-guidedads in WordPress. As tags are often generated automatically, e.g. derived from the page using scripts/tools, I can envision the same ideas being extended and exposed to the entire World Wide Web. Google AdSense makes an attempt at finding out for itself what a page is primarily about. It does so off-line or ‘on the fly’. Why not involve the user and use his/her knowledge for assistance? That is where tagging, as in the example above, bears tremendous potential.

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