Thanks to the help of Lorelle I was able to insert the „Oddiophile’s Technorati Tags Bookmarklet“ into my webbrowser and edit it sufficiently. This enables me tagging my posts in a simple and personalized manner – for a really easy lecture on how to do it, see Lorelle’s post. Thus this blog gains two improvements:

  1. The tags below the line is another possibility to structure the content of this blog. With their help, one prompts a direct search of the blog, looking for the respective word.
  2. The tags are picked up by search engines such as technorati and help those, who might be interested in what I write finding their way here.

Usually, on wordpress.com the categories, in which the different posts are arranged serve as tags for the search engines and as a structure to the blog. But as I think that both, categories and tags, serve distinctly different purposes, I rather choose to have both. Otherwise, I would be pressed to violate the categories as tags, subsequently multiplying the number of these and loosing their role as units, which give the blog its overall structure. In comparison, tags relate themes and contents of posts, which are not necessarily of the same kind. Every dumb bot should be able to identify the tags. The categories can be a personal way of structuring content. Tags are the labels on the jars. Categories are the shelfs.

E.g. a humorous post telling a joke involving an accident with spaghettis and a recipe on pasta may both involve spaghettis and therefore need a tag with mentioned ingredient, but as one is a joke and the other a recipe they may be filed under the categories „fun“ and „bon appetite“.

I find the double use of categories as tags and the absence of independent tags the biggest drawback in the otherwise wonderful service of wordpress.com. Others who share a similiar opinion are a.o. Lorelle and Abhijit. I’d strongly suggest to implement something like the ultimate tag warriour plugin into the system, as the bookmarklet-solution produces the problem of having to guess or take notes manually, which tags have already been used. Please leave a comment if you think likewise -and if you don’t agree, please tell me why.

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