More than three years ago, Macrobyte added custom fields option to Conversant, the software I use to manage this and the rest of my web sites. That was like a revelation and I think I’ve exploit the feature more than anyone else using the software — I have some sites that have a couple dozen different fields and close to 2,000 values within those fields. The extensive, detailed categorization that has is one of the reasons my sites have been as successful as they have been.
Now the rest of the world has discovered “tagging” posts with categories (I hate that word “tagging” — sounds like I’m out spraypainting graffiti) thanks to services like Flicker, Del.icio.Us, Technorati and others. And that’s also brought a bit of a blacklash which goes something like this: tagging posts is a pain in the ass and users will quickly abandon it.
Dave Winer captures this view in describing why he doesn’t categorize his posts,
I’ve seen the same thing. I have a very easy category routing system built-in to my blogging software. To route an item to a category, I just right-click and choose a category from a hierarchy of menus. I can’t imagine that it could be easier. Yet I don’t do it.
It’s also very easy to add a new category, or to even reorganize my whole taxonomy. Never do those things either.
A picture named billg.jpgI have a theory that it’s like desktop calendar software, which people were very excited about in 1985 or so (they called them Personal Information Managers or PIMs). Seemed like every new Mac software product had a calendar in it. John Sculley and Mitch Kapor were singing their praises. Users got all excited about them too, and set them up imagining how great it was going to be to finally have an orderly life. They happily entered appointments, until they spaced out or got lazy and didn’t enter one. All it takes is one for the excitement to turn to guilt. You don’t even want to look at the thing because you screwed up. Quickly you never use it. I’ve seen this happen both in my own work, and in others.
The category stuff works the same way. At first I delighted in the ease of routing stuff to categories. Eventually I would only route to one or two categories, and then I stopped altogether. Not because it wasn’t easy enough, but because the guilt had taken over.
People like Dave and others are basing their guilt on a fundamental misconception, however, that categorizing posts has value only if you do it to every single post. But adding metadata has value even if you only end up tagging 1 in 50 posts or 1 in 100 posts.
I’m a categorization freak, but I am also fundamentally lazy and sometimes I just don’t feel like categorizing my posts. So, I don’t. For example, all of the articles on this page are ones that I was just too lazy to bother categorizing when I posted them. And that’s okay.
Even a little metadata can add a lot of value. For example, you might be a hockey fanatic and decide, you know, that the only posts you really care to tag are the ones related to hockey. Why should you feel guilty over not obsessively categorizing everything? You shouldn’t. Go on with your life. Get over it.
The other error I think a lot of people are making is assuming that tags only have value in relation to services like Del.icio.us and Technorati, etc. The single best use of a categorization scheme is to present a page or pages on your site that show, for example, all of your posts about hockey or, taking it to the next level, having an RSS feed of all of your posts about hockey.
What’s the payoff? Traffic. The one thing that most bloggers share is they seem to want more traffic. From my experience, tagging posts and then aggregating them on topical pages will drive traffic to your blog/web site like nothing else. I am definitely not an A-list blogger and get very little traffic directly from other bloggers, but I’m currently averaging about 40,000 page views/day thanks to search engine friendly topical pages.
Of course most people probably aren’t as interested in obsessively categorizing everything as I do, but sites I run where I have done only minimal categorizing, that categorizing has helped push the traffic levels to relatively high numbers compared to what I see other bloggers — even very popular ones — out there reporting they receive.