Wouldn’t we be better of if categories on blogsome (or any blog site for that matter) behaved like free tags ? So I am writing a post and I can think of a new category taking shape – my tags would become categories.
Why have categories at all ? if blogsome had a central tag repository – I can have a “block” (drupal-speak, I know) for all my posts in tag buckets and another block for all other people’s posts in that bucket…
Yeah, I like the idea of being able to create a category on the fly. Lots of times I’ve had to create a new category because I suspect this will be the first post of many on a similar topic.
I guess I like categories because I’m a hierarchical thinker – I have categories inside categories, and in them, even more categories. This is partly so I have a manageable list of parent categories. Although, there isn’t good facility for having a link in Blogsome of the child categories. I’m still working on that one.
I’m not so sure about a system-wide bucket, however. Particularly if they auto-complete. This could create a huge server load, for one, and two I might have to type more characters to get the tag-egory I want. Especially if some dim-wit spelled Psychology as Psychologie, for instance. Which would appear in an auto-complete list first. Having the ones you have used appear first could alleviate this.
I’ve been using the web interface more than an offline editor lately, and with the jstools I updated I’m pretty happy with that. It’s certainly possible to improve the category list, including adding the ability to add new categories. Perhaps using XMLHttpRequest. I did do this type of thing to allow me to delete comments from a post page.
I am still unable to reconcile the useful differences between tags and categories. Another way to achieve the hierarchical categories is to have a concept of nested tags.
To me, one big lure towards tags is the internetization of it (global is a more accurate word for it, I guess). Tags offer that relevant perspective to your posts that categories do not.
We currently have the problem of duplicate tags already and its solution will truly be an “one-size-fits-all” one.
Tagories, Tagegories ?