I hate to admit but I find myself facing this dilemma on and off all the time. It just bugs me sometimes wondering what are the best definition of a category and for a tag, and how should I catergorize or “tagerize” them.
Well, my peanut-sized brain tells me that:
A category is like a box. You can have many boxes. You can have boxes for books, tapes, wine etc. In this case, book, tape and wine are my category.
I think that tagging was made popular by social sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us. A tag is something more specific to the stuff that you have in your box (OK, OK, I know I should think outside the box, it’s just an example anyway :)). For example, Harry Potter, Aerosmith and Johnnie Walkie can be considered as good tags for the boxes.
That was easy. But wait till you have a blog for a while and find that your list of tags grows out of control. Some people can possibly have more tags than their categories! I perosnally like to keep things simple. Think before you tag. Take an example, there are lots of wine and basically they are either red or white. So instead of having tags for each red and white wine, you can instead have 2 tags – red wine and white wine. So whatever wine that i’m talking about, they are either tagged red or white. And for sure, some people will say it’s better to go with a subcategory.
You see, my friend, we’re spoilt with choices. Categories, tags and now subcategories… Take a shot. No big deal.
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