On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 12:05:01PM +0100, Dave Page wrote: 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