An essay by Jakob Lodwick on February 1st, 2005
Tagging, as seen on Flickr and other sites, allows you to organize things in a way that makes sense to your brain. You may also notice that tagging photos on Flickr is the first time that organizing something has made perfect sense. According to Scientific American, in 1966 Ben-Ami Lipetz concluded that:

…breakthroughs in information retrieval would come when researchers gained a deeper understanding of how humans process information and then endowed machines with analogous capabilities.

Well, Ben was right, as you’ll soon see for yourself. By looking at how we tag photos on Flickr, we can understand how humans process information. Once we understand that, we can understand how to model it with computers, thereby creating better information retrieval systems.

What Ben was unable to predict all those years ago was that we will not only develop better information retreival systems, but also model our own brains on the lowest levels, and eventually create artificial intelligence.

Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain (by Jakob Lodwick)
via La Taberna del Turco