Categories vs. tags
How to Save the World post, My Blog Taxonomy, and some Technical Notes illustrates the blogs new taxonomy. (Not sure if this is a traditional taxonomy - akin to a physical taxonomy where an item in only filed in one category).
It got me thinking on how I use my blog categories. It seems I’ve started using them as subject terms, but I don’t like the idea of where this is leading as the list will get too long.
I prefer them to act as broad containers that may go 2 or 3 levels as the taxonomy mentioned above…and of course they don’t have to be a strict taxonomy, they can be just categories. (traditional 2nd or 3rd level sub-headings can be amongst 1st level if they want, who cares, as long as it reflects your content and is not rigid).
So, using broad names as categories is good for browsing, but what about retrieval…you can always use the search facility.
Better still why not have tags on every posts, but call them subject terms.
This way the categories represent a general topic summary of your content…and the tags represent specific subject terms of your content.
So every blog posts could have a category topic and also subject tags.
Before you publish the post:
- apply your blog category/s
- apply your subject terms…these subject terms will link to tag names in a personal social bookmark manager
When you have published the post:
- then bookmark the post in a tool like Furl with the appropriate subject tags
The extra step is that you have to bookmark every post straight after you publish a post…otherwise if you forget, that post will not appear under that tag.
Also, somehow display a subject term index or zeitgeist or tag cloud (whatever it’s called) in your blog.
Or you could put a link on the side bar called Subject term index, which goes to your Furl account, there lives all your subject terms (they are called topics in Furl, and the icon looks like a folder).
Wow, this also becomes a search engine for your blog, as you can search full-text in every subject term (topic) in the full-text of the whole archive, in essence of your whole blog content.
Only thing is you can’t search for a blog post in multiple categories, unlike del.icio.us.
This is also great for those of you like me whose blog is on a free-host (who knows the future of your blog, it may end tommorrow) as Furl cache’s all bookmarks, so your content lives on and can be cut ‘n paste into a new blog.
To top it off, if it was available, get some code for a Furl search box on your blog…with 2 choices, search for a subject term or search full-text.
Then you have created your own personal search engine for your blog, instead of using Blogdigger or Technorati.
Although, doing it yourself with Furl, you have to index every post yourself and you can’t do fancy link searches on your personal search engine as it only has your posts and no other posts from the blogosphere.
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