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When it comes to sorting contents, I always hesitate, typically I'll have categories and tags both as reasonable options, still I wonder when to use categories and when to use tags or even, when to use both? Categories looks simple and simpler to implement and tags provide much more flexibility but often appears to be too complex and affects usability. Think about del.icio.us for example, looking for content in thousands of tags is not an interesting thing. To this point I bet categories are actually more practical. Because like delicious what's really working is the hottest tags which I think, conceptually, are 'categories'.
I saw wordpress is using a general scheme to handle this. It implements a general taxonomy to deal with categories and tags in the same manner. It makes the implementation a bit more complicated tho.
I'd like to hear other people say about this. Thanks.
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Categories are best used for broad groupings of topics. For example, if you're creating a site that reviews media, you might use categories such as Books or Film or TV. Tags are much more specific topics that you want to use to associate related content.
According to the WordPress definition, categories allow you to broadly group post topics, while you can use tags to describe your post in more detail. In an ideal world, we would use categories to group the content on your website into — say — eight to ten global segments.
So, what's the difference between tags and categories? While categories indicate the genre of your post, tags are more specific and indicate the specific topic your post seeks to cover. The best tags use a few words to describe what the post is about.
Tags and categories on posts are used to help readers locate information in different ways. Categories are like chapters of a book; they provide a general overview of the topics you blog about. Whereas tags are more like the index at the back of the book and explode the topic into a million bits.
I'm not sure there's a single, correct answer to this.
Tags are a paradigm that imply overlap, while categories imply no overlap.
Categories (either as a flat list or hierarchy) have historically been most useful for organizing dozens or hundreds of entities.
Tags have historically handled hundreds of thousands of entities better.
Neither is more correct as a general rule.
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