Categories and tags and keywords

Technorati recently unveiled a new feature for their little search engine that tries to categorize content by keywords (they call them ‘tags‘ just like Flickr does). They even pull images from Flickr.com and links from del.icio.us. While it’s a very neat idea, there are some problems with with the whole mob taxonomy thing. Mainly with words that have multiple meanings, like the flash tag, which shows you plenty of Macromedia Flash related content, along side some photography using flashes and even some posts about flash memory mixed in there.

But these small drawbacks aren’t enough to keep me away. I’ve added a few categories to this blog and edited some old posts to better categorize them. Technorati should pick up on the new categories and automagically add my posts into their tag system. Some of my posts are already there, but since they were so poorly ‘tagged’ it wasn’t doing me any good. Another benefit to this is that with more categories and using mod_rewrite with WordPress, I should see some more traffic coming in from Google as it indexes all the new keywords in my category URIs. It should also help users who aren’t sure what this site is about by showing them a nice broad list of topics in the sidebar instead of the limited topics I had before.