Thursday, 11 August 2005
Categories vs. Keywords vs. Labels vs. Tags 
« Multiword tags, tags with punctuations, and tag-based searches | Main | Why Simpy over del.icio.us »
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).
Simpify!
Technorati Tags: simpy tagging folksonomy socialbookmarks search hierarchies categories
Comments on this entry:
My tag cloud is big too. I tried organizing it, but I gave up! Lemme see if can code something to solve this problem!!
I am thinking of a drag and drop application, for managing simpy bookmarks. and since i will write it in python, should be cross platform! Let's see where this leads to. I'm starting to learn python, so mighttake me a while!
Venkat:
Mmmm, a drag and drop application would be nice. Maybe you want to look at http://www.pygtk.org/ if you choose to go the Gnome route. If you want some ideas for cool desktop apps that make use of Simpy, I have plenty of interesting ideas, so feel free to email me at otis@s....
My tag cloud is really huge too. Worse, I am having trouble staying consistent. I used to use the tag "web 2.0 sites" and sometimes just went with "web 2.0" and "web sites" seperately. That is one thing I still find frustrating that is hard to solve.
By the way, given your interest in tagging, I thought you might like to check out www.blinklist.com, a new social bookmarking and discovery engine that we have launched. Come back next week when we launch a new update. If you get the chance to check it out, would love to hear your thoughts. Mike
I agree that using lots of tags is the way to go, this is what makes tags different.
But what about if you want to show someone a bucket of information, like here is a group of links on "RSS search".
You wouldn't be able to as you would bookmark stuff as Feedster, Technorati, Bloglines, etc..all scattered.
Wouldn't it be good to have both Categories/Labels, and Tags...so when you bookmark a page about Feedster you can choose "RSS Search" from your category/label set, and "Feedster" from your tag set...best of both worlds.
You could have 2 tag sets or bundles.
I think people get too caught up with the words/definitions used. It is simply a willingness to freely associate one thing with others. This "association" is a child-of-many-names, but should/must have multiplicity.
However, many people find it hard to think of things having many aspects, although they use them that way (by having several sets of aspects, e.g. one category, a few labels, some keywords and a set of relations).
[too bad with all the spam comments]
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