If you’ve looked at the meta line underneath the headlines on this blog recently, you might have noticed that I’ve started tagging on this blog.
I’m using a WordPress plug-in called Jerome’s Keywords, which puts a convenient text box for entering tags on your Compose page and then gives you lots of convenient functions to call them up on your blog. In addition to displaying the tags on the meta line, these tags also appear in the page’s meta keywords (which, contrary to what some people think, isn’t totally useless).
Why tagging? I’ve thought long and hard about the rationale for emphasizing tags over categories. Obviously tags allow more specificity than plain old categories do. Categorization is a vestige from the days when knowledge was limited by resources like everything else in the world. If you’ve only got one hard copy of your biography of President Kennedy to put on the shelves, you’re probably not going to create a whole section for Kennedy family history. You’ll probably stick it on a shelf labeled “U.S. Presidents” or “U.S. History.”
But on the World Wide Web, the shelves and the books are all virtual. Nobody has to print up a thousand copies of your screed on President Kennedy and physically file it on a thousand different shelves. We can create new shelves on the fly as soon as we think of them, and we can instantly file things on a thousand shelves simultaneously. (Or, more accurately, keep one copy of the book and create a thousand different pointers to it.)
Marshall McLuhan once said that “the medium is the message.” The exciting thing about this whole cheesily named Web 2.0 thing is that we’re just now starting to discover what kind of medium the Internet is. Just as early television shows were little more than theater productions captured on film, so the early web was little more than magazine columns and marketing brochures distributed through digital pipes. That’s changing now, just give it time.
(A sideline: I find it quite irritating that Senator Ted Stevens got so much heat and ridicule heaped upon him for calling the Internet “a series of tubes.” Not that I mind Ted Stevens getting spanked so much, because I think he’s a reactionary blowhard. But his analysis of the Internet as a series of tubes was basically sound, albeit lamely phrased.)
(Another sideline: As I’ve written before on my DeepGenre post The Mutation of Genre, I believe that genre is another vestige of limited resources that will eventually disappear. Meaning in fifty years, a massive catch-all term like “science fiction” won’t make much sense to anyone anymore. Instead you’ll be browsing exclusively through finer gradations like steampunk, alternate history, and medieval thriller.)
What this all means for the blog is: whereas before, only the pages sharing a broad subject matter like book promotion were tied together, now you can find all the articles in my blog related to pattern recognition, for instance, or the KGB Bar. You could have just typed “pattern recognition” into the Search box, of course… but chances are you wouldn’t have thought of it, and having a handy-dandy link makes you that more likely to pursue it.
So why didn’t I just expand the list of categories? Why not add just add categories for pattern recognition and Krokus and The Empire Strikes Back and all the other little things I talk about here? Because I’ve hedged my bets by keeping the categories system too. So you’ll still be able to peruse broad categories of my blog posts (e.g. film, technology, science fiction) as well as granular tag terms.
How long this arrangement is going to last I don’t know. Keep in mind that I’m still going back through the archives to tag old articles, so the process isn’t complete. Once I’m done, I’ll probably find someplace to stick a tag cloud too.
Let me know what you think of the tags so far.