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.
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.
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?
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Site Search Tags: tags, tagging, tag, tag+services, search, results, wordpress, wordpress.com, wordpresscom, wordpressdotcom, category, categories
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network
29 Comments
Hi ‘Relle
I like the site search tags idea. I absolutely love the way you put SO MUCH EFFORT into each of your posts, manually (I presume) adding the related posts links at the bottom and so on! You rock, like no other!
Thanks. Actually, the adding of tags manually with the tagging bookmarket for WordPress.com users takes only a few seconds.
But don’t tell everyone. I like people to think I send HOURS working on tagging my posts. hee hee
Completely with you, infact I did try to discuss this with some of my friends, but they were all over the categories=tags. I have tried to put it put it from the point of view of a developer - http://iface.wordpress.com/2006/02/25/wordpress-categories-as-tags/
Finally, someone that has cleared up my own confusion and use of tags. I knew that tags and categories were different but I could not put it to words. Now I am thinking about how I approach tags and categories on my site. Thanks.
What is the first division you make when creating a category? by topic, by format…? I found your bookmarks on RawSugar but it dosn’t use Categories… personaly I like to have tags and categories but only if mantained! …and that’s a problem =) that’s where tags come to the rescue.
Clustering or hierachical categories, we should know how to use as it’s the same as folders, but I still wonder what the best technique is. I would love to hear how you proceed.
I found a good article here: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/HierarchyVersusFacetsVersusTags
Tagging does depend on our mood…
The bookmark list on RawSugar wasn’t created by me so I don’t know how they sorted the links.
I have an article coming out in a few days about how I create categories and choose tags, so stay tuned.
And tagging should not depend upon mood but facts. If you are writing about WordPress Plugins, then clearly adding a tag for “fun” isn’t going to do anyone much value. Tags must match content in order for them to have any value.
Again, think of categories as a table of contents and the tags as your index page words. That is the simplest way to proceed, but stay tuned for more.
The wordpress.com decision to make categories double up as tags was just a way of jumping on the tagging bandwagon without actually bothering to construct a proper architecture for it. It’s a lazy implementation which now cannot be rectified without causing an even bigger mess.
I just simply don’t agree. Tags or “categories” (in the WordPress meaning of the word) are Just. The. Same. Thing.
ya got it ,
Tags is kind of search tool..
but categories more usfull to easy get one you want in small area “blog”
browsing stuff as in google news , technorati , Flickr ..and the new projects like Google Code “opensource” projects Hosting..
my thought about tags to control the flow of info . and get the right ones to the right place .
I think of categories as a table of contents and tags as the index page of a book.
Great analogy
Dang! I made a wrong decision of completely ignoring the categories and went for tags instead. Now I have over 400 posts without a category and it goes without saying that I am facing problems. Is there a way I can convert tags into categories? because thinking of manually categorizing so many posts gives me the creeps. I am using Ultimate Tag Warrior. I’ll be immensely grateful if you could help
Create your categories in the Manage > Categories Panel and then use something like Batch Categories WordPress Plugin to move posts into those new categories. I don’t know of a way to move tagged posts into categories, except manually, but you can ask in the UTW forum or WordPress Support Forum to see if someone would develop a Plugin to handle the transition.
Let me know what you uncover.
I’m trying to expand my site to create other specific areas outside of my main blog (for instance a “movies” area, a “television” area etc). After some research, I think I’m clear that I need to use categories and possibly category templates to achieve a blog-within-a-blog feel. The problem is that I’ve already accumulated a ton of categories based on my article content. What happens to these when I create the higher level blog categories? Do they become sub-categories that I suppress? Does this throw off my permalink structure? If you could shed some light on this, I’d really be grateful.
If you change categories and have permalinks enabled with the category names as part of the permalinks, yes. You will screw things up. But that is easily fixed with redirects.
Thanks for the plugin Lorelle, this is going to make things a lot easier as I was going to manually add posts to different categories one by one, and that would have been one hell of a task. I had batch edit in my mind and I thought it must be an in-built WordPress feature, but after digging around the categories settings a little I found out it wasn’t there.. but anyways.
Thanks again!
My blog is new and I already can tell my tags are silly if seen through the tagging community. But my blog is my own myspace layouts and other myspace layout sites have to characterize what the layout is like if it’s blue, TV, actress, model, celebrity, pink, fantasy, sexy, etc. But this is only to help the visitors to find what they’re looking for. I only so far have two posts but are my tags done right or is there another way to have them as what they’re intended as, which is categories, instead of the way it is now? Thank you!
Since you are using WordPress.com, your tags are your categories, unless you are manually adding them. They will be here soon as WordPress upgrades to tags, but right now, your tags are categories.
Categorize your content. Stop thinking MySpace think or anything else. Think table of contents. Think how the reader will find the information they are looking for if they were looking though your categories as a table of contents.
For more on this, see Tags and Tagging in WordPress.
Thank you! I rather have categories instead of tags. The only two tags I would have are MySpace and Layouts. But everything else I want as categories as you said providing a table of contents. Because having blue and pink as tags is silly.
Categories need to be things people will search for, or see and know immediately that this is the information they are seeking. Unless your blog is totally about colors and their physiological and psychological impact on the brain, or something like that, then why bother using colors for categories?
Categories and Tags are completely different, with discreet uses… Categories describe the mature/topic/area-of-focus etc. of a set of posts (like the TOC analogy) and may contain sub-categories in a heirarchy strucure. Categories are not Meta data. Tags are Meta data and these should represent the ‘hidden’ keywords (in better systems would allow cross-reference to site meta data/categories/topics/specific posts to improve context) that search engines and the like would pick up on to direct someone to your site/category/post. I have just started using WordPress for a serious piece of business that I would like to start and now I find I may have made a mistake… Have an issue with not being able to embed a private weblog within a public weblog as well.
Odd place to ask this question, if you are asking a question. You can create a blog within a blog within a blog, all using links to connect the blogs together. To create a private blog, follow the instructions within the Administration Panels to require a password for access.
You can also make any blog post be private by designating it such from the Write Post Panel, giving it a password to restrict access.
For questions such as these, please see the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users, and the WordPress Support Forums for help.
I know it’s an old post - but still a pretty useful explaination, so thanks!
I was always a little confused by the multi-categories idea with WordPress, I categorized posts to make them more ‘intuative’ (so I thought) but because the permalinks tended to always include the Alphanumerically-first category, things sometimes didn’t make much sense.
Since 2.3 arrived I’ve been going through my old posts and editing the unimportant categories into tags.
Oh, and I also love your ‘Site Search Tags’ idea - makes it much more user-friendly.
Thanks for clearing this up, Lorelle. I am a blogger that uses ExpressionEngine for my CMS, and I’m considering purchasing the Tag module now since I understand what tags do.
First of all, thanks for your grand contribution to the blogosphere (I do suspect you dislike that word, but hey).
I was going through your post about Site Search Tags, and discovered that it was tagged with categories. This goes against wht you say here, doesn’t it?
I see that ‘filed under’ in this post has links like http://wordpress.com/tag/wordpress-themes/. Why /tag/ when they refer to your categories as listed in your left menu?
Maybe it has to do with wordpress not working correctly (as I could interpret from this post), and you decided to redirect /tag/ to /category/ under the hood. I don’t know, but I sure would like to know more about it. Hope you will explain this to us
Thanks again,
Mauricea
@moodrama:
Who knows what often lurks in the minds of those in charge of WordPress.com.
On the issue of tags and categories, I’m as confused and concerned about tags as anyone. When this article was written, tags were the great hope for micro-categorizing our content. Of course, they were abused, Technorati didn’t follow through on the promise of tags, and things fell down. Now, WordPress has added tags to their core programming, and tags appear to be semi-broken to me. A little late to the game, and I’m watching to see how they will next evolve.
And nothing in my opinion has changed. I have always declared that tags that generated content from within the blog not without have greater value to the READER and the blogger than tags that take them off-site. So I’m not sure what you are seeing in conflict here.
As for the redirect of the “categories” in the post meta data section of my blog posts, that is done by WordPress.com and I have no control over them. They do take the user off my blog, and I have protested since day one. This is why I continue to offer site search tags and will not use the new built-in tag feature in WordPress, as WordPress.com turns those tag links into WordPress.com tags, not my blog post tags.
Thanks for the quick reply! I guess that is one of a good bloggers charms
But I am not quite sure what you mean by ‘They do take the user off my blog’. In version 2.3.1 (that I run) tag functionality seems to work just fine. If I click on one of the tags that are listed on my posts, they take me just where I want them.
Love, Mo
@moodrama:
If you are using the full version of WordPress, then you can control where the tag link goes. If you are blogging with WordPress.com, however WordPress.com sets the tag link is where the visitors goes, which in my case, is off my blog.
Hi Lorelle (and everybody),
I was looking for a way to use tags to provide individual feeds much like categories. I’m planning on setting up a central aggregator of acupuncture cases, and would like the individual tags (covering such details as the condition, treatment method, etc.) to be specified on the individual sites.
Is there a plugin for this or a way to translate tags into categories on the fly?
Thanks.
Burton
@Burton:
I’m not a fan of aggregators, especially those that do so without permission, so make sure you get permission in writing before you go forward.
You can have a feed based upon tags or categories without anything special, so I’m not sure what you are asking for. I’ve listed how to link to these in WordCamp Israel WordPress Tips Talk.
If you want something to automatically create a feed list, I’m not sure. I don’t work with aggregators so I’m not the right one to ask on this.
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