[Sigia-l] Eliminating categories in favour of tagging

[J S]

My employer is in the process of upgrading its internal blogging
platform. The new version announcement came out a couple of days ago, 
and contained a statement to the effect of "since tagging is the new
best practice in metadata generation for blogs, the new version will
not have post categories, only tags".


We have a team blog at work, and after a lively debate, chose to go with
freeform tagging instead of limited categories. We're using WordPress, and
use the cat2tag plugin -- as a result, users see a tag cloud instead of
category list when they go to choose tags for a post, and they can also
create and apply new tags as they post. 

People liked this so much that when upgrading to 2.0 broke the plugin, one
of the software architects fixed it. They liked it because it made their
lives easier. The tags function in the software the same as categories --
there are feeds and archives for them. 

Whether or not this is a good idea for you depends on how you want to use
the tags or categories. We went with minimal hassle to note "aboutness" and
enable people to find things again later, and for us, tags do that. Of
course, "us" = 7 people posting to one blog.