Don't Back Down

It seems that the folks at Six Apart have released a new plugin for tags on your entries, which seems to replace and/or to complement categories. I've talked about tagging before. I think it's a phenomenal technology. The problem with this, and with categories in general, is that those are my tags. This has been covered here before, by me and by others.

Adding tags to an entry doesn't help anyone any more than categories do, both because they are my tags and not yours, and also because it means someone needs to come here to find them. That doesn't make any sense. At any given blog, you can go and look through tags is great - but to find them, you have to go to each blog. Using a search engine or a social bookmark manager makes inifinitely more sense.

So why do I use categories, if this is how I feel? Simple - I try and put a reasonable category on each entry, and those entries are then aggregated into a category feed, so if you want to only keep up with entries in that category, you can do so without wading through everything else I happen to say. But does it mean that you will agree with the system, or that you will then be able to find things later by that same system? Not necessarily.

That said, the plugin is cool, and allows the dynamic creation of categories - that's a neat feature. But let's be honest. Categories may not be the best way to go. Many of what people call your a-list writers don't even use categories, yet they are still monumentally popular. Maybe that should tell us something.