Now isn’t it great :-). After yesterday’s reports that Oracle had brought its mind around the concept of social tagging (a nice harbinger for large corporates), here comes WordPress and changes the rules.
Actually, what they’ve done is recognize that «tags» (or keywords) are not the same as «categories» (or taxonomies). In their own words, tags are a transient creature, varied, prolific, maybe used only once for a single piece of content… whereas categories are pre-defined sections for different themes or subjects, staid and stable references for navigation.
Personally I’m glad they saw the light (it was getting hard to manage tags and categories with a single tag-oriented classification mechanism, in this blog). It will cause some havoc among RSS services (what do you want to track?). It will also help to shine the light on the differences and different uses of folksonomies and taxonomies… not from a theoretical point of view, but from the ground up: in several million blogs. In a year from now, I won’t have to explain those concepts again.
Well… hope so :-).
eme ká eme 
It’s nice Miguel :D
But Tags aren’t under the point of view of classification, they’re Search engines oriented. In a blog we must categorized the articles, and afterwards … always afterwards, apply tags in order to overcome searches, making sense for such thing called folksonomy, that it make sense for people too.
What I mean is that categories are the spinal tab of an scheme, the tree that contains the branches, and you must contrains them to minimal. In the other side, tags are the seeds, common to several trees, and that may be the source of a lot of the branchs. They don’t show the trees but make sense in order the trees growth.
And you must make categories simple, and they must be only a few. In the other side, tags are the content of your articles, they’re the core meaning of the article, and they aren’t the structure of your articles. That’s what I understand about tags and categories, thats about trees, and branches and seeds.
:D
Publicado por Fernando | septiembre 28, 2007, 7:09 am