[OGDev] Google searches

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 12:05:01PM +0100, Dave Page wrote:
> On Friday 07 April 2006 11:54, Tom Heath wrote:
> 
> There have been mutterings in the past about replacing Categories and 
> Locales with generic tags. I for one think that it would be a good 
> idea.

I responded to this on IRC a while back, but I'll put it here for
historical purposes:

Tags and categories are two entirely different methods of describing
something. Tags are designed to be a personal representation of the
content that something contains -- 'fun', 'cheap', 't-accessible' -- not
a more general description of the content in question consumable by the
general public.

Categories and Locales are designed to be a more controlled selection of
data. They are roughly based on a pre-determined categorization method
-- to the extent that I take special care to keep category and locale
lists trimmed, since they are then used for selection by other users.

I am totally against replacing categories with tags. The use of tags and
use of categories do not match up. I do not have a problem with adding 
tags in addition to categories.

In general, I think the 'folksonomic revolution!11one' is crap. I think
that tagging is a poor solution to categorization. I think that it works
well in limited circumstances -- typically when you have an extremely
large userbase dedicated to tagging. I think that it's confusing to
non-technical users. I think that it only works even remotely well when
you can have tag suggestions for a 'thing' made automatically, because
otherwise people don't know what kind of other tags are in use. I think
that the idea of finding 'related' tags is difficult, especially when
you have limited tags to choose from.

But I understand the popularity, and in some cases, the apparent
improvement that such an oppourtunity would offer. But it's by no means
a silver bullet of categorization, and replacing categories with such a
thing would not be a good idea, in my opinion.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer