Post tagging
As you probably noticed we have replaced the category list with the brand new Tag Cloud on blog sidebars. We just launched the ability to classify your posts into multiple tags or labels. This replaced the old category-based classification mechanism. In the sake of simplicity, we moved existing categories into tags, and removed the interface for category classification.
Tags work like keywords. You can classify a post with as many tags as you like and you can edit them later. We tag posts in a search engine friendly fashion, so that search engines like technorati pickup your posts and assign them to correct tags.
Try it out: Post about a movie, and fill out the tag input with: "movie; drama; scarlet; de palma". Naturally, if you wish to use those exact tags, you'll need to go out to your local theater and watch The Black Dahlia if you wish to write something interesting.
This system is great your personal information, allowing you to later retrieve your posts by combining tags. It also allows you to posts by other authors that use the same tags. It's also great for finding out about people with your tastes, also writing on blog.com -- for example other posts about The Black Dahlia). We'll be working on some new browsing pages that will allow this feature.
If you didn't enjoy this new tag cloud you can switch to the old tag listing system in the Sidebar section in the editor, just click edit in the tag cloud line and choose list. You also can order these blocks alphabetically or by number of posts.
One last note: in the tag cloud, the bigger the tag name the greater is the number of posts under the tag.
Bring it back! (Comment this)
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You just broke my heart! Shot down without any consideration. I love your blog site and appreciate how easy, user friendly, intuitive, flexible, and forward thinking it, and you guys are, and I can’t believe how quickly you (collectively, I am assuming) decided that “tag” is some superior word that must be used in the form of a “cloud” (what ever that means) or “list” (THAT I can understand!). Even the first commenter wants the old way back. “Tag” doesn’t mean anything to regular people. Why be so adamant?
To me “Tag” is not intuitive and has no meaning except to only hard core ‘bloggers’ or computer people (of which I am, and it still doesn’t make much sense to me). I am very disappointed with your decision.
Thanks for your response.
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hell! why not call them categories (who said categories are exclusive?) (Comment this)
I understand your questions about the naming of tags, and I will forward this thread to the development team. In the meantime, let me present our rationale:
As to whether we should call it Tag or Category, we went with Tag because of the multiple classification. As Harry puts it, there is nothing to say that categories are for single classification. However, historically on the web, tags are associated with multiple classification systems. Moreover, tags are associated with shorter terms, which are a lot better for post-processing blogs and finding out what people are writing about, what groups of interest form in blog.com, etc.
On the issue of Tag vs Label, it is again a historical reason. Tags are labels and labels are tags. They're synonyms. However, on blogs the term tags is the one commonly used, as you can check on Technorati. There is no reason for blog.com to be different from all blog providers and introduce noise in communication.
Anyhow, I believe it shouldn't be hard to allow all sidebar boxes to be manually titled by authors. I'll send a Request For Enhancement to the dev team.
Thanks for all the feedback! (Comment this)