Categories organize, hierarchically. Tags need not. Tags provide meta-information, Categories need not. Tags cross-connect, Categories do not. By cross connect, I mean, when you go looking for posts tagged with “Flickr? on technorati, you find posts from various sources, all about Flickr. Now if you go searching for posts tagged with “administration? in technorati, you will find everything from system administration tips to posts regarding the NASA, the NSA, and general verbiage – largely due to poisoning from people who can’t get the difference between tags and categories straight, for the most.

Get your semantics right, wordpress.com folks – please If you don’t you are doing a disservice by poisoning so many indices that work by means of tags. Earlier today, for the nth time, I ended up with a wordpress.com blog as the result, and the entry was totally unrelated to what I was searching for on IceRocket.

And technorati, shame on you for saying

“A tag is like a subject or category.”

If I were in the business of earning my subsistence from the concept of tagging, I would try hard to make a distinction between the old and the new that I am offering, and to elucidate the advantages and novel uses of tags.

Tags are Not Categories by Carthik Sharma agrees with my opinion that categories are not the same as tags, and he makes a good point.

Applause, applause, loud clapping, bravo!

As tagging has grown, it gets harder and harder to use tagging services effectively when anything and everything is being used as tags. For a while it looked like things were settling in and and the key tag words were rising consistently to the top, but with 100,000 WordPress.com blogs (and growing) now available using categories as tags automatically, more and more tag search results are turning up a high percentage of false-positives.

Tags need to be clearly defined as distinctive from categories. I’m very selective about my category choices. I have only recently added a few more specific categories, which I will discuss soon, because my content topics have now expanded beyond my core four categories.

Adding a category like a tag creates long, cumbersome, and ugly lists in the sidebar. I have hundreds of tags on this blog. Could you imagine what my sidebar would look like if every tag I used was a category? It’d reach through your desk to the floor and beyond.

Until WordPress.com adds something like the Ultimate Tag Warrior, which adds a tag input form onto the Write Post Panel and then permits weighted tag clouds (tag heat maps) or tag lists within the WordPress Theme layout, you can still use the option of manually adding tags to your posts and not giving into the competition of having your category “seen” on the WordPress.com category/tag cloud.

Honestly, why do categories have to be tags. Categories can be tags, sure, but not all categories are tags, and not all tags should be categories. I think of categories as a table of contents and tags as the index page of a book. If I’m searching for a broad topic, unsure of exactly what I need to find or the keywords, then I will hit the table of contents (categories). If I know the exact word I need in order to find the information I want, then I will hit the index page (tags). As repositories of content and information, why should blogs be any different?

Other News

• Discover the Layer Mask
• Internet Explorer 8: Features
• Those factors in the Google Web site ranking
• Discover the Magic Wand for Image Adjusting-part 1
• Define Your Own WordPress Loop Using WP_Query
• Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax
• Basic Image Enhancement
• How to SEO your site: Episode 3 – Keyword density and keyphrase research
• Say goodbye to SEO as you know it, latent semantic indexing explained
• Discover the Brushes Palette