I've been reading about tags vs categories for a while now. Lorelle is a big fan of The Ultimate Tag Warrior – a Wordpress plugin which makes the creation and management of a tag based site (or folksonomy) less painful. I'd like to say easier, but transitioning from categories to tags when you've already got a reasonable amount of content isn't. It's not exactly hard either – it's just not something you can leap into without a bit of thought.
As a starting point, I had a look at Technorati and discovered that of the 100 most popular tags, there are only really a handful of top level ones that I write about. Things like Apple, Film, Music etc. Of course, there is a level of variation within these categories, for example any piece of content written about Apple could also be classed as Mac, Apple Mac, iBook, iMac, and more. Film could be film, films, movies, flicks, dvds: you get the idea.
Tags are intended to provide additional information about a post or piece of content. I like to think of it as meta-information, although that's probably just the geek in me. Tags enrich the pool of information you're searching through and hopefully make the search for that information easier. My view is that they're also useful for adding additional contextual information to a post. So, to use my recent Hills Have Eyes review as an example: its new category will be Reviews, plain and simple. Previously it fell under film, horror, and review. With a tag based approach I could use tags like remake, gore, horror, Aja, Craven etc. It appears (in the context of the web) to be more "acceptable", and my own view is that it's more usable, to apply large numbers of tags and fewer categories. My thinking behind the acceptability of tags is that this approach provides the reader with a choice: Do I want to chose from a larger selection of "meta" data about this post, or do I just want to know what its reason for being is? And so that's how it all sits in my mind: Reason for being = Categories, meta or contextual information about a post = Tags. A reader can then browse through my site either by moving from post to post via tags (so each post would be quite closely related) or by categories (which would take a broader view of posts with a similar intention or origin).
From now on, all of my posts will fit into one of the categories below:
- Reviews – Any review, whether it's of a film, gig, book, album or anything else.
- Distractions – Fun or amusing asides which are purely considered to be an entertaining distraction. Hence the name.
- Site specific – Posts which are about this site. These could be about Wordpress upgrades, redesigns, or features. The post you're currently reading in this category.
- Solutions – The aim here is to provide some useful piece of information based on personal experience. If the post has some useful content, be it a piece of software, a solution to a problem, or how to configure something, it'll be in this category.
- Thoughts – My personal take on other posts online; a more upmarket site would probably call this editorial content. Yes, I know that all the other posts technically fall into the category of "thoughts", but if they don't fit into any of the others they'll appear here. I had hoped to define a set of categories which were mutually exclusive, but it's difficult to write something without thinking about it.
As a result of trimming down the number of categories used, I've had to tweak my "page not found" (404) message and make it a little smarter. It will try to provide the visitor with a list of related posts and a link to the relevant tag page for the category you were trying to visit (thanks, in part, to the information I found here). Apologies for this, but I thought it was for the best.
