On Blogging Australia

There has been a bit of discussion lately on the Aussie Bloggers Forum about categories and tags: when to use categories as opposed to tags, and how to make each of them useful.

Categorisation: a basic human need
People are categorisation engines - we categorise experiences so that we can learn from them and deal with them. Without going into the whole categorization theory and cognitive linguistics thing, think of categorisation as the process of putting concepts into boxes so that they can be managed. This starts with individuation - as babies, we come to distinguish between self and not-self (all those things we can directly control and those things - like mother - that we cannot) - and continues throughout our lives.

My perspective: Information Architecture
I thought I would give my perspective here as an Information Architect (more correctly, as a practitioner of Information Architecture methodologies and principles). Information Architecture, or IA, is about designing information systems that are useful - so that people can find the information that they need to get through their day. There are a lot of big fancy words thrown about - but that is basically it. Think of the goal of IA as informational socialism - “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” means ensuring that everyone can produce information according to their ability (i.e. making it easy to produce useful information that meets a human need) and receive information according to that need. That is all there is to IA, really: making it easier for the writers to write and the readers to find and read the information that they need.

So, to put this into perspective: anything that helps people find what they need is a good thing - and anything that gets in the way of writers writing or readers reading your blog is your enemy. People use categories of things to define their environment, they want to be able to find information according to the categories that they are familiar with. This has implications not only for finding a blog within a desired niche, but finding individual posts within a given blog.

Why categorisation matters to bloggers
Categorisation matters because it can help or hinder your readers finding the information that they need.

What is a useful way of categorising blog postings? Basically, in a way that makes sense to your readers. Not you, but your readers.

Imagine you’re writing a recipe blog like Faux Cuisine. You categorise recipes according to main ingredient because this makes sense to you. So you might have the following categories:

• Beef,
• Chicken,
• Fish,
• Pork,
• Vegetables, and
• Pasta.

Main ingredient is a browse facet - it is one way that people might want to find things (in this case, recipes). Other browse facets could be:

• completion time (Faux Cuisine is about quick/easy recipes after all),
• preparation complexity (in terms of either number of ingredients or preparation time),
• cost of ingredients,
• gluten-freeness, or
• relative spiciness.

The main take-away (pun intended) from this is that different people categorise (and expect to find things) in different ways.
How can you pick one categorisation scheme that works for everyone?
Your readers want to find things in a way that makes sense to them. So how can you pick the one way to categorise things that works for everyone?

The scary thing is this: you can’t. There is no one way to group blog posts (or anything else, for that matter) that works for everyone. Different people will always want to find things in different ways.

Holy cow! What can I do about categorisation then?
I’m glad you asked

The best thing you can do is to accept that different people find things in different ways - and embrace this. Use multiple categories to give your readers the best possible chance of finding the post they want when browsing by category.

How does this work in a world where Google rules? The Big G punishes those who put things into multiple categories - when a post is put into multiple categories, because of WordPress’ ../category/category-name directory structure, it shows up on indexing services like Google as a duplicate post.

There are two easy things you can do to stop this “pretend duplicate post” mistake by Google:

• follow Meg’s advice and add Disallow: /category/ to your robots.txt file, or
• read Supplemental index blues and use the Duplicate Content Cure plugin for WordPress.

Either of these should remove the fear of multiple categories from your blog. You will be able to post in multiple categories without incurring the wrath of the Big G.

And how do you know that your category pool is sufficient to the task? Ask your readers - if they know you, they’ll answer honestly when asked if they found enough information on a particular topic in a way that made sense to them.
Categorisation in action: Categories vs Tags in WordPress
WordPress allows you, as a writer, to categorise posts and add tags to them. Once you have used some way of not being punished by Google for using multiple categories, you can use as many categories and tags as you like.

Here are a few thoughts on categories vs tags in WordPress and the relative worth and use of each.

Categories:

• I feel that the category vs tag divide is a little artificial for most blogs. Most of us run some kind of blog platform where we are the only author - that is, we can add categories and tags at will. The only thing that differentiates them really is that category is more likely to be a browse facet than a tag.
• In a large multi-author environment, a limited number of categories would be a good thing - if everyone was allowed to add their own categories, they could soon run into the hundreds.
• Limiting the number of categories to the bare minimum is probably a good thing for all concerned - if you are going to allow “browse by category”, then the list shouldn’t be dozens of categories long (this will make it harder to find the right category) - but by the same token, if the category list isn’t long enough, then there will be too few choices for those difficult souls (i.e. the rest of us) who love to find information their way
• This blog uses the Mimbo theme - out of the box, Mimbo allows five categories and five alone to be displayed in the right hand side of the main content pane. I’ve upped it to seven because that is the minimum number I felt comfortable with - but any more than that would just get in the way of how I like to run this blog. The other two categories that I use are Current Feature (front and centre on the main home page) and Recently Popular (last five posts that received enough comments to make them worthy of keeping on the home page).

Tags:

• Because later versions of WordPress have made it harder to use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin without fully replacing its functionality, tagging has assumed a very secondary role - browse by tag (i.e. by having a big tag cloud) has been basically taken away from us.
• Tagging within individual posts still serves as an adjunct to keyword meta-tagging, so it is useful - just not as useful as it could be.
• Tagging allows for individual posts to be distinguished within their categories.

The bottom line
The bottom line is this: help people find the information that they need in a way that makes sense to them, and they will love you for it. Use as many categories as you can (but not too many), tag freely, and ask trusted readers if they could find all the information that they wanted to find on a particular subject.