Tagging posts or using categories?

With my last post I found some difficulty choosing a good category for it. I think I need a couple of categories to cover the content. But having a post in multiple categories, isn’t that similar to tagging?

Maybe some of you haven’t got a clue about what I speak when I say “tagging a post”. So I’ll explain this a little bit. It’s actually very easy. Tagging something, like a post or a photo, means that I have some words describing it. If you have a family vacation picture you might tag it “family”, “your name”, “other names”, “vacation”, “Europe”. Two popular sites that use tags are http://del.icio.us/ and http://www.flickr.com/.

There’s some advantage of using tags instead of categories. One is that you can choose more tags than categories. I can’t imagine having a list of 100 categories on this page so that every page is in a category it relates to. On the other hand, having 100 tags or more is not unusual. Another advantage is that it is easy to display the “importance” of each tag. With “importance” I mean how much this tag is used. Look at the popular tags from flickr to understand what I mean. The more a tag is used, the bigger its font size.

So I think I’ll be investigating what the possibilities are on this blog for tagging. There are some tagging plugins that exist for wordpress. Let’s hope one of them is a goodie.