Category vs Tag

Posted by shuron
February 2, 2008

Since Wordpress official introduces tag support categories became strong concurrent, this leads to the question how to deal now with categories and Tags?

I think that tags are very flexible and also somehow naturally to use, you don’t have to think very carefully which should be taken, and which was used before, you just tag it with firs you get in mind. Tagging or labeling is something natural to humans, think of yourself. Everybody has normally meanings about things in his near environment, we give them names even then when we don’t really understand them. So tags seems to be even replacement for categories, which even leads some bloggers to live entirely without categories.

Categories

However categories.gifI think to pass on categories is not so good, because tags and categories have different semantic and purpose, we should not do without categories. Let me explain why. There are two main properties of category, that discern them from tags.

  1. Wilful classification
  2. Hierarchies

What I mean by wilful classification? Usually you think about your category structure at the introduction of the blog. So you take time and divide your further articles wilful in some categories. That helps yourself and others to find only such articles that are from their interest. So your classify all your post in some careful considered categories wilful.

Further categories enable building semantically hierarchies in this classification, because you can build sub-categories, even big category trees (which is not good idea in my eyes). So we notice categories are something different to tags, and effort more consideration (in beginning).

Solution

The solution is of cause a symbios of both concepts. I think categories should not try to copy the flexibility of tags, categories should keep tags in order with small well considered category set. In other words i propose the use of categories as coarse grained classification of blog articles and fine grained flexible classification or labeling of articles with tags.

Example Restructuring of my blog

I begun to write in this blog before tags became standard in Wordpress, so i tried to categorise my articles only, this led to such categories:

That is defenetly to much, some of them can be easy be cowered throug tags. So i deside to build only such categories:

Fine granularity will be managed with tags. Thank you for reading. I begin with restructuring now. ;)

P.S. You may be also interested in discussion about categories tags an Technorati issues.

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