Blogger Hacks, Categories, Tips & Tricks

Saturday, October 01, 2005
Tags vs. Categories
When is a tag a category? A great explanation & discussion at Library Clips, of which this excerpt is just a choice piece:

Tagging is described as a 1 stage process, where you think of many concepts and tag them, seems natural, intuitive, easy, and fun (well fun for librarians!)

Seems like an easy process; although when considering later retrieval you have to think carefully about the tag names for future findability…but I guess the first concepts that come to mind are probably going to work best

Categorising is described as a 2 step process, where you think of many concepts but you only choose one concept for the item.

I also liked the conclusion that 2 tag sets may be required. I tag generously, with one eye on Technorati & the hope that readers will come here from tag search. This is less useful for my internal del.icio.us "tags as categories" system, where 10 broad & recurrent tags would help the reader navigate my site more efficiently. Maybe tags can't really be categories after all?

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Posted at 2:44 PM by John.
2 Comments:
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Anonymous Anonymous said...
Personally I believe that tagging is perfect when used example for locations etc, but not as categorising as eventually spam will take over.

Tagging is a cool word for the old search engine phrase "keywords" and you know what appened to them.
If something "when tweaked" can bring visitors to your site, people will eventually abuse it.
It would be extremely easy to bring thousands of people to your site simply by abusing tags.
I will be introducing tags o my site but the site wont be based around tags.
Another great read here..

An Excellent analysis of Tagging

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Blogger John said...
The link is dead. I think the recommended article is A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging at Rashmi.Sinha.


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