Tags and Categories
February 24, 2007
Tags? Tags and categories? or just categories? That is the question. Or rather, at approximately 20:25 this Saturday evening it is…
I’m writing a simple CMS app for a bit of fun (in Rails, yes I’ve jumped on the bandwagon) and after adding all of the basic fields and features (title, body etc.) there always has to be some way of organising the entries.
Looking around the net today, particularly at blogs or recently deployed “web 2.0” applications, tags are used in abundance. In fact you even see them in desktop applications, such as photo management apps like Aperture, Lightroom etc.
Without naming names, I visited a site earlier today which had all of the entries tagged. Fair enough. I can click on an individual tag to see all of the entries tagged with that particular tag. It works pretty well.
However if I want to see the other tags used then that’s a different story all together. I’m greeted by a quite sizeable tag cloud. A tag cloud, yes, with the most commonly used tags showing up in a larger font. How is this helpful to me? Am I interested in how many posts a tag has or am I interested in seeing what the other available tags are? It’s the latter, so having huge tags scattered throughout this “cloud” only serves to make it harder to see the smaller, less commonly used tags.
By contrast another site uses categories to organise the content. There are about 8-10 of them in total and they cover all of the topics written about on the site. So despite their more generic nature I know in a glance the sort of topics that are covered.
I know there are people who swear by the “old” hierarchical method of categorising and equally I know there are those who swear by the “new” way of tagging everything, to me, when used together they work brilliantly, but only one is truly necessary.
Categories.
Yup, the tried and tested method of categorising works well for me, whilst tagging is primarily useful as a form of meta data which can aid when performing searches via a search field. Of course that pales in comparison to a full text search; so really… tagging outside of large communities or sites that cover a narrow range of topics, don’t seem as useful to me as the “fad” (maybe a little harsh) would suggest.
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