Wriging

I myself have been questioning the whole "tags vs categories" thing. I see tags as extra clutter sometimes in that even if you "tag" an item or post with words that generally make sense, it doesn't mean that a user searching through your blog for content is going to use the same terms that you tagged your content with. So now you just have this big a$$ tag cloud taking up real estate on the blog. I think categories keep things simple and easier to deal with.

I installed the UTW plugin on my blog ... read up on instructions, tinkered around with the code.

Then I uninstalled it.

I don't understand the benefits tags have over categories. The function of categories are clear cut: each post are categorized according to their content. Tags? Eh?

The tags themselves are really the same as categories. Whether you call it a tag or a category is semantics. It's the listing of them that makes all the difference.

As I understand how tag clouds are being used, they are a means of indicating content categorization while also indicating popularity (because tag clouds are a type of weighted list). So, although they may consume more real estate, they are also adding a degree of new usability. Perhaps we need to clarify the question: Are tag clouds (a weighted list) more useful than a list of categories (an un-weighted list)?

Distilling it that way, I think tag clouds win out. If you scale to large amounts of categories in a list versus a huge tag cloud, I think you'd find the tag cloud more useful most of the time. In smaller quantities of data, a tag cloud would be nearly identical to a category list. So with a tag cloud you get scalable usability, popularity indicators and the same categorization capability.

Still you have to decide if the added usability is worth the real estate. Does displaying tags/categories as a more organic cloud fit the design themes of the site, or is a linear list more appropriate? …you get the idea.

Interesting note to think about.

Excellent question. The recently released WordPress 2.2 is more tag friendly/orientated I believe so it'll be good seeing this question get played out here in notes.

Here's a quote I recently came across. It's by Cory Doctorow

"Tags don't work because people lie, they are lazy, and they use different tags. And there is a huge amount of information that will never be tagged."

You can read the Silicon Valley Watcher article at this link... I use tags but they tend towards atrophy so I end up with a swamp of words, which are sorta pointless if organization is the goal. Suppose it all depends on how you use tags but categories seem cleaner, more stout and less flighty than tags - in my opinion.

I use them both. Categories are used mainly just for old posts. They aren't displayed publicly, either.

Categories for me- are organized items. You have a pre-determined bunch of them, and sort all your things withing them.

Tags- identifiers that help users find relevant items within posts.

Putting it into context, you could write an entry about a movie, with a particular title. For something like that I would categorize it under something like "reviews", and then I would tag keywords such as the title, the mood, things that are brought up etc -(like fun, hot chicks in latex, ramblings,etc).

That way if someone wanted to check out if you wrote about other things relating to various items within the post, they could easily do so, but if after a more formal search for more reviews (something specific), they could search under the category of reviews.

Thats what I think anyway. I don't even implement it though :)

I've questioned the same thing, particularly when I was on WordPress. I had tags for a while and what I loved about them was it told me what I was talking about (I could obviously control tags on my site so it was accurate). If my blog was about blogging but I was talking more about something else, I could see (at a glance) that my focus changed.

Now flip that situation to 9rules. We "could" control the tags but that would mean we'd have to monitor every note. Are the tags accurate? No. Do they give a good idea of trends? Yes, because here most people are good about tagging things. At a glance the ability is there to see the popular topics (which is different than popular note). Great admin tool.

There are some plugins that allow one to do that with categories (for blogs) but it doesn't seem to be used much. Yes, this can make categories huge (as in the amount) but there is one major benefit to using categories. For the most part if you decide to change platforms, categories will go with you. Tags most likely will not (I think WP exports them now but I don't know of a CMS that accepts it yet). I've seen tags lost changing tag add-ons. I like to have 100% control over my data, since it's mine and all so I'm finding ways to make categories tag-like.

Tyme: 9rules employs a good mixture of tags and cats. Communities are categories, tags are tags.

"...there is a huge amount of information that will never be tagged."

That got me to thinking that, well, Google has tagged just about everything, or is in the process of it. Keywords for your site, its posts, images and even your desktop at this point are basically tags, right?

Maybe better search functions on sites would make tagging things irrelevant. Or a feature that allowed you to middle click on words (hyperlinked or not) that would do a site search or even a Web search for that word.

Because in reality, tags seem to be most useful when they apply to words that aren't in the actual content of the post, such as if I was writing a post about my cat Angie who was a Siamese, lets say, but I never mentioned Siamese in the title or content, yet still wanted that word associated with it.

Hah, I think Google calls that "blackhat."

I use both.

I use Categories for post type like "anime review", "figurine review", "admin", etc.

I use tags to describe the main subject of the post, but I'm still trying to sort out what I should and shouldn't be doing for adding tags. I don't want to over-tag, but not enough tags is just as bad.

I kind of always saw it this way: a category system is when each article corresponds to only ONE category, while a tag system is when each article might correspond to SEVERAL categories. So, in a category system, an article about the Titanic might go into a category like "boats" while in a tag system, it might be tagged with "boats, history, disasters, movies, celine"

That's just always been my view of how to use them. Also, tags provide the ability to create descriptive categories on-the-fly. Flickr would lose a lot of it's power if you had to fit each picture into a single preset category.

All I'm saying is I think it depends on what you're trying to do. In my personal blog, I use categories, because the things I write about are relatively general: Family, Movies, Music, etc. In a project I'm working on, however, I'll be using tags because the subjects are more specific (IE, the articles are all about ONE subject, but all the different facets of that subject).

I use both categories and tags on my blog. For me, categories are more pre-set: I have a set of them and I always use one or more of that pre-defined list. Interesting to note here is that I do use more categories for one post.

Tags, OTOH, are made on the fly. I tag a post with its keywords, in fact I could simply check which words appear the most in my post, strip out words like "the" or "is", and use that as my tags. Tags define the content of the post in a short way.

Now, the most valuable use of tags is that the UTW plugin for Wordpress allows you to find related posts. Next to each post, I show three other posts, which have roughly the same tags, and therefore talk about the same sort of subject. Quite surprisingly, this works really well: the posts the UTW plugin thinks are related are almost always really related.