Articles and other resources

These articles and posts are ones I have used in developing my thinking on tags and Categories. They are in the order I found them and so are better and more recent as you go down the list. There is a second list of examples of topic schemes at the end.

1. Implemented: Tags! (on the introduction of this capability in WordPress 2.3);
2. Three Unique Uses of WordPress Tags (2007) (Feeds For Software/Plugin Updates, Temporary Categories and “Best Of”/Hot Articles Lists);
3. [resolved] Tag archive from a single category – Is this possible? (34 posts) (2008);
4. WordPress Blogging Tips: Categories and Tags (2008) (one cool site: blogging tips) (on WordPress.com blogs);
5. WordPress.com tagging tips: Don’t be a spam-dexer (2008) (one cool site: blogging tips);
6. How to use Categories and Tags (2020-06-29: temporarily offline?);
7. Tags are not Categories (2006) (short and sweet);

8. Lorelle Van Fossen:

   1. Are Tags Working For You? excerpts:
      

      This post preceded the next, Are Tags Working?, and cites it. See the list of related articles at the end of the post.

      Categories are your blog’s table of contents. Tags are your blog’s index words.

      Categories are large groupings of related articles, and tags are the micro-categories, keywords that describe the content within your blog post.

      Every blog must have categories. They are critical to directing your visitors to content that may hold the answer to their searching need and help them find related content. Not every blog needs tags, but many bloggers think they do.

   2. Are Tags Working? (Blog Herald) excerpts:
      

      [LL is on the right track but doesn't address IA and the use of metadata.]

      [See the list of related articles at the end of the post.]

      Categories work. I use categories all the time on the blogs I visit. They represent the content on the blog, directing me to categories of information I may be interested in. I also use them as identifiers on the expertise of the blogger. If the categories are related, they must know what they are blogging about. I see categories as your blog’s table of contents. [Yes, a TOC but not necessarily for a blog as a whole, a major qualification.

      Tags, however, are more like your blog’s index words [if she means keywords, she should say say so!]. They are micro-categories.

      WordPress is about to incorporate tags into their core programming ….

      As a blogger, tags are important to me because I assume they are useful to my readers. But as a blog reader, I don’t use them nor rely upon them. I don’t trust them.

   3. Tags Arrive on WordPress.com Blogs (2007; 1,200 words). This post lists more than a dozen of her posts on tagging and categories and the comments are worth reviewing. Post excerpts:
      

      Tags are like your blog’s index. They are keywords that represent the micro-categorization of your blog’s content. To work effectively, they need to be words that people search for, called search terms.

      Categories are automatically marked as tags in WordPress. Theoretically, your blog doesn’t need tags. But many like the notion of breaking down the words that describe their content beyond categories, and tags offer that ability.

9. Categories vs Tags Either, Neither, or Both (Andrew Rickmann, WP Fun, 2007). There is a good discussion in the comments. Post excerpt:

   … I don’t use them, either as an author or as a user, and I have yet to read comments from anyone that really likes them. Sure, some have said they bring in more traffic, but not that they really like to have them there to use. There must be people that do I’m sure, but the fact that they are not obvious leads me to question the necessity of tagging.

   Lorelle comment excerpt:

   You make a really good point. Why should tags be used to “describe” a post when that’s the job of the content. And in fact, while tags should offer keywords that are descriptive, that’s also not their intent.

   The intent of tags is to take the reader to related content, much as a book’s index list would. “Show me all the pages with ‘wordpress’ on them.” If you are looking for more information on WordPress, that is a critical method of finding more within a blog without a category called “WordPress”. If the blog has only 6 articles dealing specifically with WordPress, then why should it have a category for it? A tag or index word would help locate those articles that a reader seeks.

   … Google doesn’t recognize tags, though they gave it much consideration, eventually coming up with “labels”, which are actually categories not tags, for their Blogger blogs. But the search engine doesn’t give much weight to the use of tags, though they are thinking about it. Technorati now searches with keywords, not tags, to find relevant content on blogs in its index, so what good are tags to the founder of the tag movement? …

10. The Eric Marden post in [wp-hackers] Cleaning up tags (2010-01-08) post discusses some of the issues when tags have proliferated. (Mike Schinkel provides a solution to the wp_term_relationships table issue. See also SQL Query to delete all tags.)
11. [wp-hackers] Some Thoughts/Enhancement Ideas In And Around The Category Side Of Things (2010-02-08) thread has several good discussions of the ways categories can be used and permalink structure strategies.
12. WordPress Blogging Pipeline and Projections (Andrew Wey, 2007, alt) discussed the introduction to WP of a tagging feature which he referred to as a comprehensive taxonomy framework. He discussed capabilities which would improve the corporate oriented blogging and, to a lesser extent, the content management aspects of the platform.
13. The Death of Taxonomies, revisited (Theresa Regli, CMSWatch Blog, 2009-11-13) and her prediction, 3. "Taxonomies are dead. Long live metadata!" in Technology Predictions for 2009 (2008-12-16). She was referring to traditional, monolithic, and single-hierarchy taxonomies and:
    

    … the death of what I’d call the typical turn-of-the-21st-century taxonomy project (which I did dozens of times, as a former taxonomist), where librarians and/or linguists spend a few months in an organization determining how enterprise content should be categorized, so content technology could use it optimally. This project would usually be followed by an even longer period when people would admire the taxonomy, nod knowingly, saying “that’s exactly what we need!” – but not tag anything, despite the roadmap and project plan saying they should.

    Discussing the Semantic Portals of Eqentia with the Gang (Greg Boutin).

14. What Every Blogger Needs to Know About Categories (Chris Pearson; 2008-02; 925 words); excerpts:
    

    … the one size fits all implementation you see everywhere on the Web—the proverbial long, ugly list of category links now appearing on a blog near you.

    By giving users a list of categories to browse on your site, you are creating a psychological conundrum that usually leaves them with a severe case of analysis paralysis. This is a condition where users, when presented with too many options, end up selecting nothing at all. [analysis paralysis]

    … categories are the single biggest contributor to both page bloat and link dilution, two of the most abominable SEO sins.

    Although it takes a bit of forethought and organization to pull a series of posts together, the end results are well worth the trouble. When posts are linked together in this manner, they drive traffic in a meaningful, useful way. Additionally, content that is presented as a series appears more authoritative, and in my experience, this leads to links, links, links! [comment]

15. What Laziness Taught Me About the Importance of Flat Architecture (2007-11-13): For the average small website, almost all of your link juice / PageRank will naturally accrue first to your homepage, from which it is filtered to your sub-pages via your site's hierarchy.;
16. Introducing WordPress 3 Custom Taxonomies (Paul Kaiser, Nettuts+, 2010-05) is an excellent tutorial with background on the evolution of WordPress taxonomies including Categories.

17. Microsoft adCenter Labs offers a tool to categorize content, Content Categorization Engine described as:

    This tool displays the categories most relevant to a Web page based on its content. It also shows the degree of confidence that a category relates to the page's content. To classify a web site into categories enter the URL.

    I tried several popular WordPress related pages and categorization failed. When I examined the categories available, I saw that there were only 10 categories each with a half a dozen or so sub-categories. Of the example URLs, microsoft.com mapped to a dozen categories based on only 200 words.

    S: What are "custom taxonomies"? comment (Examples of custom taxonomies | Custom taxonomies, Codex documentation (t170_m24)).

18. Tags are not Categories (Carthik Sharma, 2006-02-26, 325 words) is one of the earliest posts on this topic. Excerpts:

    … categories can be tags but tags cannot be categories.

    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. …

    Cited in What are "custom taxonomies"?.

I found the WordPress tags versus categories and WordPress tags vs categories queries useful [these were search suggestions when I was entering WordPress tags nested, below].

Examples of topic schemes

1. A List Apart is an example of a two tier scheme and annotated categories.
2. Compare the A List Apart scheme with Tim Bray's What topic scheme.
3. Rubiqube.com displays Categories with descriptions.
4. Becoming A Writer Seriously has an excellent table of contents titled set of Categories.