Comments on: Dog Tags / Dog-egories

By: Dave’s Whiteboard » Blog Archive » Things I don’t quite get

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:32:30 +0000

[...] Levine at CogDogBlog muses about tags versus dog-egories. I haven’t used tags on the Whiteboard — not sure why. Maybe I’ve thought of them [...]

By: David

David — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:12:01 +0000

D’Arcy,

I have 342 tags and 10 categories (I guess I need either 3 or 12 categories for full irony) and I think your description is a clearer way of how I use them than my description was – I guess that makes me a tagger.

By: D'Arcy Norman

D'Arcy Norman — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:20:15 +0000

I'm a tagger. I've got 684 tags on my site, with 6 categories. I use tags to describe the content, and categories to indicate the "type" of post. The tag cloud is a bit, er, unruly, but is still pretty usable for finding stuff. Although, I usually just use fulltext searching to find stuff in my old posts anyway...

By: David

David — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:26:28 +0000

I use both. My categories are used to organize the content so that readers can follow only posts on local politics (as an example). I use tags to define related posts – independent of categories. I think readers can follow a specific tag just like following a specific category, but I use a plugin to analyze the tags and find related posts in a way that’s much more flexible than simply returning other posts from the same category.

By: Ruben Puentedura

Ruben Puentedura — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:41:53 +0000

They’re not dead – they’re just pining for the fjords…

More seriously, I suspect part of the problem may be that many of the tag cloud widgets out there have relatively weak visualization design – better use of color, layout, and font sizes would increase usability dramatically. Viewer-selectable settings are also important: according to my particular set of interests on any given day, I’m going to want to look at the tag cloud somewhat differently.

Wordle (http://wordle.net/) gets many things right in my view, but there’s plenty of room for further experimentation.

By: Claudia Ceraso

Claudia Ceraso — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:59:46 +0000

Tagger.
Tagging comes first to me. I can only categorise as a result of analising my tagging tendency. That’s when seeing the pattern makes sense out of the *apparent* tagging mess.