Bill Cammack

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my blog via RSS feed or by eMail. Thanks for visiting! ~Bill

I changed my site theme in late February, 2008, 3 months ago. One of the changes I made was to use tags instead of categories. Part of the reason for that is that I was consolidating my media output onto one site, and I had decided that I wanted it all in one stream with the option for people to choose things they found interesting from the tag cloud. I hadn’t used tag clouds before this, so I was interested in the difference.

The way I see it, or the way I’ve implemented my tagging system, I’m not satisfied with the ability of tags to take people in a coherent direction. The reason that’s important is that people mostly come here looking for one specific thing. At this point, I want them to see a way to find more things that might be along the lines of what they’re looking for. Tags are good to show people which topics or concepts or names come up more often on my site, but they’re too specific. At the same time, they’re too vague.

Tags cross all sorts of category boundaries, so there isn’t much incentive to click on one. OTOH… If someone came to the site looking for information on video editing or wanted to see my videos or get some DatingGenius advice, they can do that by clicking on the catgory, because it’s a canal, inside which reside *ONLY* posts pertaining to the topic they’re interested in.

I decided to set this up today for two reasons. The first one is that a friend of mine was telling me that she couldn’t find a video of mine, and when I went to my category listing, which used to be “hidden” in my Archive page, as soon as I clicked on “Video”, what she was looking for was on the first page. I realized that it’s easy for me to use tags, because I already know the elements and the players. If I know that it was Eric that did a video, I’m just going to search on his name. That doesn’t mean anyone else knows that. Also, if the category is “blip.tv”, for instance… Unless there are more entries in that category/tag than the lowest entry on the tag cloud totem pole, it’s not going to show up in the cloud. This means there’s no obvious way to get to my blip videos… ESPECIALLY if you don’t know what company they were created for in the first place.

The other reason is that I’m finally going to start doing my video editing tips screencasts, and I needed a place to hold those, specifically. I have my “Video” category, but I output so many videos, they’re going to be lost in the sauce, immediately. I needed to make a “Production & Post” category to house all things about filming and editing. It’s actually a different section from Video and also from Social Media. So now, I feel prepared to move forward with the next phase of my internet posting output.

I had been thinking about redirecting domain names and/or using sub-domains, but moving categories to the front page really handles the business. If you didn’t get what you were looking for when you landed here, there are obvious options for you to choose that will most likely get you some posts that pertain to something you’re interested in, and after that, you can subscribe just to that category and receive it in your viewer via RSS.

…….

“You” being the fictitious person that I imagine is reading this post in the first place, hahahaha :D

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