With the release of Wordpress 2.3, tags are now a standard part of all Wordpress bogs. However, many new bloggers don’t know the difference between tags and categories so I thought I’d elaborate.

Categories are the different areas of your blog. They are the sections that you want to break your blog into. Categories will continue to gain more and more posts over time as you post on them often. Think of them like the main services or main product categories on a website.

If you have a site all about sports, your categories may be: Football, Baseball, Golf, Basketball and Hockey.

Tags are words or phrases that are specific to individual posts. They are items that will give the post additional exposure. Tags differ from categories as they are words or phrases that are less often used.

Example tags for the sports site, on a golf post about the Tiger Woods video game, may be: Tiger Woods, EA Sports, Playstation 3, PGA Tour, XBOX, Wii, Video Game.

Technorati announced tagging just two years ago! I found it hard to believe that tagging is only two years old. But on the web, I guess two is much longer than I think.

“Tags are a simple, yet powerful, social software innovation. Today millions of people are freely and openly assigning metadata to content and conversations. Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that people dislike, the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives leads to a rich and discoverable folksonomy. Intelligence is provided by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy outperforms more structured approches to classification”
- Technorati’s Tag Announcement two years ago.

Tagging revolutionized the web with it’s take on organizing information. Now, instead of categories, some sites are just using tags. Instead of folders, places like Flickr organize in tags. It’s one, almost universal, language. The only sticking spot is Google and their labels. Same thing, different name.

Technorati was one of the first big players in the tagging revolution. Now today, most blogging platforms, along with most social sites, support Technorati tags and they are being adopted more and more each day.