New Generation of Multimedia Albums

The advent of WWW and its widespread use in mid 90s resulted in many people take advantage of it for saving thier multimedia content over the Internet. Also many big service providers such as Yahoo and MSN contributed so much to this desire by providing groups and photo albums and so on for free to everyone. These cyber albums and galleries was very impressive in that days providing you sharing your multimedia content with every one in the world.
but it was not the end. That's really great to share your content with all people but it is nothing more than digital counterpart (exactly counterpart) of traditional photo albums. Information technology is actually much more powerful than providing just this facilities (Although it is very nice and useful ). The main drawback of these traditional-like multimedia content collections is that it must be known before use. In blunt terms you must know excatlly where to find what you want. In almost all reall occasions we just know what we want and expect from Internet to help us find where it is. The booming search engine Google is excatly do this albeit in a general purpose.
Experts soon came up with innovative ideas for addressing this shortcoming in multimedia contents. Flickr(photo) , Dailymotion(video) and YouTube(video) are actually utilizing these idea to help users just know what they want. The technique they apply is very simple. They save all the contents in flat way (contrary to photo albums that you can define whatever hierarchy you need) but assign userdefined tags to each resource. A tag is not anything more than a string of characters that describe the resource from a particular viewpoint. I think it provides the same abstraction that heirarchy provides but not in exclusive way and that's the actual improvement.
This way of organizing resources in Internet is just started but going to change the way we think about Internet very soon.