020806
I remember the day I got my shiny new Gmail account and discovered the art of tagging. I admit I was a little overzealous and wanted to apply tags to everything. I cursed Windows file folders and blog categories as archaic anachronisms of Web 1.0. But now that the charm of a new way of doing things has worn off, I have seen the error of my thinking.
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If you haven’t used Gmail, del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr, or any other service that uses tags, here’s the deal. Tagging is a method of organizing data that some people refer to as a “folksonomy,” a combination of the word “folks,” a vernacular for people, and “taxonomy,” which in greek means literally a “law of naming,” and has been used by scientists to refer to the classification of plants and animals.
When you “tag” something, you add a virtual one or two word label to describe that thing’s contents, whether it’s an image, a link, a blog post, or Aunt Patty’s recipe for chicken soup. Most people add multiple labels to describe different aspects of the item. If it’s something that’s online, other people (folks) can come along and describe the item further by adding their tags. Because an item has these short descriptive tags associated with it, it makes it easier to find other things that are related, since they would have the same tag.
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One of the things that drew me to tags was the way it seemed to coincide with the way I think. I have found that my mind doesn’t classify things by abstract categories. There is no file folder in my mind called “book” where I keep all my Shakespeare references. Instead I have a tag called “flower” which may lead me to “Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet,” also tagged with “Romeo and Juliet,” which would lead me to “Claire Danes,” also tagged with “actor,” which would of course inevitably lead me to “Kevin Bacon” in six degrees or less.
On my old Blogger blog there was no category option, so a tagging hack using del.icio.us was the only way to go. Now that I’ve moved over to Wordpress I am faced with the choice of using categories, tags, or both to organize my blog posts. In my examination of the problem, I noticed that even though tags are a fine way to organize things and group them by subjectmatter, they’re simply too abundant to serve effectively as navigational categories. If I use categories as tags, I may end up with a navigational list of maybe 50 or more items. It makes much more sense to me to refrain from using tags as a navigational tool and re-organize everything into maybe 4-6 broad categories.
Tags can still be used to interconnect the individual blog posts, but they have no business cluttering up my site’s navigation system. It then dawned on me that my mind uses both categores and tags together too. Not only are my thoughts interconnected by content, but they are also divided into broad categories like “while at work,” “while at home,” “while writing,” “while praying,” or “while at a party.”
I believe that in order for a web site interface to be intuitive, it needs to correspond with the way people think. People think in tags, but they also think in categories. When the design for this site is done, it should include some of those ideas.