Hi,

I am seeing more and more talk about tags and how this is great for web sites. There is even an EE module for this under development. But I can’t seem to clue into why it is good or why I should be interested in it.

If someone would explain why tags and tagging is good I would appreciate it.

Thank you.

Think Technorati. Or del.icio.us. Basically, it’s a blogger thing.

Kabloom!
Information arms race.

I don’t see how it is any different than using EE categories.

Social tagging and social bookmarking are just buzz words. It is basically about sharing information. If you don’t need or want to share information then you probably don’t need to get into this and it is in practical terms no different from categories in that sense. IMHO, where tagging is used in the community sense, there is a huge problem with sorting the wheat from the chaff, but then that has always been the case with the web, hasn’t it?

I prefer tagging to categories simply because tags, in their current form, tend to be free association keyword adding - you don’t have to setup categories or know in advance what category your post is going into.  You can just add a bunch of keywords (tags) that the post has and watch it all grow.

Categories, for me, are a far more formalized way of structuring content.  Both have their places.

And I don’t mean social tagging, I mean just on my personal site.

Categories = stored, structured tags.

Categories and tags are both ways of adding “metadata” (data about data) to a post.  Both tags and categories offer the same benefit to a user…a means of grouping related posts and then building navigation to that group.

Tags are “more on the fly”, categories (until EE V1.4 which has changed how categories are handled/implemented) are more of a pre-determined, saved structure to fit posts into.

Yeah, I think 1.4 will include the ability to add categories at the time of publishing. Not certain. May have dreamt it.

To add a few remarks:
Tags are often used across weblogs, even across different sites (del.icio.us, flickr).

In EE, it really depends on what you store inside the installation. Categories and tags don’t make much difference if used for one weblog or a couple of weblogs sharing the same field group and categories. But if you have completly different setups not sharing the same structure and categories - say a recipes blog, a foto gallery and a cookbook “store” - tagging allows some sort of “related” entries across these borders: E.g. link from a book to receipes from that book or link from one barbeque recipe not only to other (same category) but to books on bbq and bbq photos as well (tags).

That said, tagging has some drawbacks as well: Because tags are used intuitive (and often different by different people) you may end up with one using “barbeque” as a tag for the above example, the other uses “bbq” or even “BBQ” ... which aren’t the same tags for most systems.

-Markus

I’ve been using Categories to mimic directory-style organization (macro-organization), and using Tags to…well, tag related entries across categories. I use them both, for slightly different purposes. I find them both very useful, not only as a designer but as a user. The way that the designer, developer, or site admin organizes content may not work for my way of thinking - by offering multiple ways to sort and sift things, the user gets more ways of moving through content. They’re not always forced to think like the designer / developer / admin to make sense of a site and get maximum usage out of it.

Then again, I rarely use things the way normal people think they should be used. “Creative”, that’s the word. (“Weird”, that’s another.)