Taher at Websites, Mashups and More is creating an experiment to compare the Google Blogsearch and Del.icio.us category methods. It'll be interesting to see how the study stacks up & what the outcome is, but the pro's & cons of each are pretty clear, I think.

The Del.icio.us method is involved. Posts must be tagged & bookmarked to del.icio.us, but there are benefits:

• Posts are listed on a public forum
• Posts contain tags that can be picked up by other search engines
• Posts are categorised as soon as you bookmark them
• Del.icio.us offers a spiffy sidebar tagcloud
  
• Results can be exported as a feed and thereby used in services like Freshtags
  

Google Blogsearch is easy, requiring only a one-time template mod, but

• it takes time for the posts to be crawled / indexed
• Your categories are really keyword search results, and cannot be hacked or extended
• Sidebar links must be hard-coded, requiring a site republish to add a category
  

All "horses for courses..." Choose whichever method suits your blogging style!! The important thing is that, as blogger users, we have a range of choices about how we'd like to sort and categorise our posts!!

For more discussion, see the comments on Taher's critique of the del.icio.us method.

Filed in: freshtags, blogtech, webtech, categories, blogger-hacks, del.icio.us, blogger