Simpy Chichimichi

This post is based on my Simpy experience. Simpy is a large social bookmarking service that sees all possible flavours of category/tag/keyword/label usage.

Years have passed since people finally realized the limitations of folders, categories, and the use of hierarchical structures to organize large amounts of data, yet I still see blog posts where people contemplate tags. I hate joining the crowd that throws buzzwords around (think tagging, folksonomy, podcasting, web2.0, long tail, etc.), but here is my take on tags vs. categories vs. ... :

One can call them tags, labels, keywords, or categories, and think of them as the same thing with a different name, but it is how you use them that makes the difference.

Categories are typically used as buckets. An item could like in only one category, and categories were organized in a tree structure. Excellent if you want to browse.

Keywords are typically used to aide the retrieval by search. They simply annotate the item they are associated with.

Labels are typically used to classify items. They are similar to categories, but let you apply multiple labels to a single item.

Finally, there are tags, and those are often used in two mods: as keywords, and as labels. Different people use tags differently. I tend to use them as keywords, as I place a lot of value on being able to find my tagged data with a search, and I place less value on having cleanly organized items. The side-effect of this is that I have a lot of tags with low occurrence counts. Some may think of this as a bad thing - my tag cloud is huuuuge, but the advantage of this approach is that I can use search to quickly find exactly what I need, in my archive of 1000+ bookmarks. I don't care to group things, I care to find precisely what I need, when I need it. The Web is a mess, but you still use Google and not DMOZ, to find information on the Web. Search is the King (Kong).