Ennovy.org

I’ve been playing around with Andy Crouch’s Keywords Plugin. It works just like the tags in del.icio.us, flickr, and technorati. It’s very very neat! There’s more discussion on the plugin at the EE Wiki page  and the talk page. So far I’ve only added keywords to my Blatherskite log, and I may add it to this weblog as well.

You can see the weighted list of keywords I’ve assigned here.

Note: the term used in del.icio.us/flickr/technorati is tag, but after some discussion us EE users use the term keyword, so there won’t be any confusion with EE tags.

Assigning keywords to a post is supposed to be less restrictive than assigning a category, because you can create keywords on the fly. With categories, you have to name them in advance. But honestly I’m still struggling with using keywords over categories. For example, take this post, which has a link to a php tutorial. I gave the post two keywords - “php” and “tutorial”. But say later on I made a post that linked to Sims 2 Inside, a page that teaches you how to build houses in The Sims 2. I would give this post the keywords “sims 2” and “tutorial”. If I were to later decide to search for all posts that has the keyword “tutorial”, I would find both the php tutorial and the sims 2 tutorial, which are both tutorials but on completely different topics. If I kept on assigning the keyword “tutorial” to many posts with different topics, I wouldn’t find the tutorial keyword very useful, the links would be too varied. It’d only be useful if I searched for all posts that has the keyword “tutorial” AND some other keyword(s). If I were to have assigned categories to these posts instead, I’d assign the php tutorial to the category php, subcategory tutorial. With the sims 2 tutorial, I’d assign it to the category sims 2, subcategory tutorial. That’d be much easier to search.

Hopefully anyone who has made it this far understood what I was getting at in the last paragraph , I’m sure other people have written about this before. Anyway that’s why I’m hesistant about using keywords instead of categories, I’m just more used to using categories (and subcategories, and multiple categories). I could use both but it feels like I’d be duplicating information.