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I know that tag clouds are the thing these days, everybody seems to have them. I know that categories are fading into the past.
But why tag clouds, it seems to me, because not all the tags you've labeled things with are shown, that they'd be less effective than the categories. People can know what they're looking for on your site and go there. For example, someone found my site and everytime I put a dream up, she analyzes it for me.
If the "dream" tag wasn't showing in my tag cloud, it'd be harder for her to go find those posts...wouldn't it?
What are your thoughts on this matter?
Me personally, as of yesterday, I've started tagging posts, but I don't have a tag cloud, and I still have my categories...
I have tags around, but I don't tag cloud yet. I'm holding onto tags for now just in case. Categories are good if you have a specific 4-5 things you write about. But their downfall is it could be a bit general at times. Some blogs may pertain to multiple categories.
With tags, you can get really specific, allowing the reader to find exactly what they came to read about. With that, however, they can almost become too specific.
Also, tags can suck if you forget exactly how you tagged something. Dreams for instance, you could have "Dream" as one tag, and the next blog could be "Dreams", creating two separate tags. I've noticed, however, that I kind of figured out the same general tags I use blog by blog.
I guess maybe the ultimate blog organization hasn't been found yet. I usually end up doing a search on the blog if that is available.
Tag clouds in the side bar are cumbersome and quiet useless, unless you limit your tags to the category or something like that.
The way to go, IMO, is categories, with a custom page that is dedicated to tag clouds. That way, search engine can feast on your tags, but your tag cloud doesn`t look like a pile of crap, and is easily available to those Web 2.0 hipsters who refuse to work with categories.
To make that work though, you might need the Pages Link To plugin for WP, and some knowledge of the WP functions thought, but all of these can easily be found with some googling or looking at the source of any WP theme.
I have switched to using tags exclusively, I actually don't use categories anymore but I use so few specific tags that they are treated like categories. I guess its all about how the tags are used, I don't mind the look of the tag cloud in the sidebar but if there are like millions of tags that are only associated with 1 entry it can look cluttered real quick...
I don't know why categories conflict with tag clouds. I prefer articles sorted into categories, with keywords/tags associated with each article. That way you can search for the tags you are looking for if you want, or browse the categories if you are not looking for something specific. Browsing tags can be horribly inefficient if there are many of them, and searching categories is too general. The tag cloud navigation bars can be neat to find the most popular tags, but are bad as the main method for navigation.
Try going without displaying tag clouds first. Blog for maybe a week, tagging posts as you go. Then after that week, determine if you'll end up with many tags with different usage frequency.
The point is, tag clouds can be a bit messy. Particularly if each tag is used only once. That one week experiment above is to test how you use tags. Tag clouds look cool because there are different sized words in the cloud. If tag word frequency is moderately the same, then you'll just have a morass of links...
I tried putting the tag cloud in my side bar. It looked confusing. And I covered diverse enough topics that the tags don't, for lack of a better word, look nice. So I took it out.
Different bloggers have different needs. You can also just try putting the tag cloud up first. You can always take it out if you don't like it. Remember, it's your blog. You're the one in control.
This post has been edited by orcasquall: 21 Nov, 2007 - 06:53 AM
Just from playing with tags and watching what the people on the blogs I read do, I decided it's cool to tag the posts, you just never know what Technorati is going to bring to me. By the same token however, I'm not using specific enough tags to make categorically fashionable, so the categories are staying.
Just for fun, as max302 suggested, I'll make a tag page, that will have nothing but a big fat tag cloud on it, just for fun
I would think it would be best (at least for what I would think of blogging on) to make tags and then have a search to find other earticles/threads witht he same tag/tags as the current article. Thus staying away from the tag cloud (becauseI don't find them very fashionable) and at the same time allowing people to find articles that are related to eachother without being forced to choose from a small list of categories.
17 Nov, 2007 - 02:11 PM
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