Sunday, April 11, 2010

Clean-up of tags

I was looking at the tags widget on the right hand side of my blog and I was surprised to see that I have used roughly 90 different tags on this blog. Many of these are only used on a single post and it makes it difficult to see what this blog is about.

After some consideration I decided the content of this blog could be categorised into the following themes:
  • GTD
  • IBM
  • Innovation
  • Ireland
  • Life
  • Mapping
  • Open-Source
  • Social-Software
  • Tools
I went through the blog posts and found that I could add at least one of these tags to each of the blog entries. I didn't remove any of the old tags (except for mis-spellings), but in many cases the blog post already contained a more specific tag e.g. the post may have contained Galway or Dublin so I added Ireland or if the post  have contained the tag Ubuntu I added Open-Source. The tag Life was used as a tag for everything that doesn't fit neatly into any other categories.

I then restricted the tags widget to just show these main categories. In future I will apply at least one of these tags to all of my new posts. It will also allow me to monitor the volume of blog content about each theme. For example, I see that I have relatively few blog posts about mapping, but this is a topic of interest to me and so I intend blogging more about it in future.

2 comments:

  1. I think there is a differentiation to be made between Categories & Tags, where Categories should be about overall topic discussed & tags should be related to the content of the article.. limiting your tags may limite readers to find you.. When doing some research regarding "social tagging" I had found a great in-depth article about it -> http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/09/09/categories-versus-tags-whats-the-difference-and-which-one/

    Rgds, Fred

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  2. Fred,

    Thanks for the link to this interesting article. The difference between categories and tags is very subtle. Unfortunately the blogger platform does not offer categories so I am forced to use some of my tags as categories.

    Brian

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