This blog, Let’s Talk – From Conversation to Collaboration, is my first experience of using WordPress. Aside from a few teething issues with the way the theme treated my graphic, I’m pretty impressed.
There are quite a few settings to come to grips with, but it’s fairly intuitive, with a lot of online help at your fingertips. Really, you could set up a decent blog without having to tweak much or spend too long learning about different settings but I’m the type of person (yep, there’s a name for it, two words, second word retentive) who likes to try all the settings and to understand as much as I can about the tools I’m using.
Gaining this understanding has included researching the difference between tags and categories. Okay, I know the concept behind metadata is to make content more searchable and discoverable, but when I published my first post I had to decide how I was going to categorise and tag it, which made me realise that while it’s easy to lump the two together in your head, they actually fulfil different purposes.
This WordPress support page: Categories vs Tags gave a good, clear explanation of the differences between tagging and categorising and why WordPress added tagging functionality to its blogging toolkit.
The simplest explanation I found was to think of categories as a table of contents, and tags as an index – I read this on several different blogs but here’s a nice simple way of putting it from Anthony Brewitt at Designbit: WordPress: The Difference Between Categories and Tags.
My tags and categories
A glance will show my category list is a work in progress – my blog is new so I haven’t covered many topics. My categories are broad and cover topics I’m likely to post on again.
My tags are more relevant to specific posts – for example the tags for this post are tags, categories and WordPress newbie.
How could tagging improve intranet searches?
In Enterprise 2.0 – How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work, author Niall Cook refers to tagging as a folksonomy, where users identify content how they see it, as opposed to a taxonomy, that is likely to be set by an organisation.
I can see the benefits of enabling content tagging on an intranet. Staff can be easily frustrated by an intranet search tool that just doesn’t do what Google does.
Adding to that frustration is the fact that the company-driven taxonomy categorises information the way management or the subject experts see it rather than the way everyone else sees it.
Enabling people to tag information themselves could solve two issues. Firstly, it would give people the power to do something about their frustration. Secondly, as more information is tagged, the search experience would improve for everyone.
Cook states: “It is perfectly possible for taxonomy and folksonomy to peacefully co-exist in organisations with formal metadata structures already in place.”
That’s great news for website administrators as everyone’s happy – management and subject experts still get to categorise information the way they see it – but suddenly other users have a whole lot of more relevant ways to connect to the information they need. As Cook identifies, connections to information are also part of social networking and can improve business efficiency as much as connections to people.
Think of a time at work you spent ages looking for something because the organisational way of categorising the information you wanted didn’t hold much meaning for you. Feel free to share.
Let's Talk - From Conversation to Collaboration 