Tagging your blog

Classification of content is important. Categorization is one way of doing it. My blog has various categories and I post content in them. Many a times I want to post an entry in two categories – then I do that. But at times, it relates to more. And I don’t want to create categories in my blog for that.

Tagging comes in there.

Tagging is a technique of adding keywords to your blog post. There are sites like Technorati that allow you to find content of blogs based on their tags. Flickr too allows tagging photographs and these are automatically shown up on a Technorati search.

Looks like tagging is also overused now! Checkout
Technorati tag on Technorati itself. Owen Winkler makes a nice distinction between categories and tagging. An excerpt:

I don’t know if I see a way to use only categories unless you were going to forego many of the benefits of keyword tagging. It doesn’t seem beneficial. Still, if you didn’t let your category list get too wild, that might work for you. And of course, if you didn’t care about tagging at all, then this whole discourse is irrelevant.

And then there is an immediate story about Mike Little (Co-founder of the WordPress software I use for blogging) where Technorati made his blog the number one blog on the internet for a while, and then moved him to number 0!

Interesting!