I am by no means an expert on blogs, either reading or writing them. When blogging first appeared, I put it down as a passing fad. Then everybody started blogging, and I couldn’t help but read them.
And now I’m trying to write one.
Anyway, continuing with the theme I started in my essay on essay sites, blogs make things hard to find. Sure, there is a search function, but that’s only useful if you know exactly what you are looking for. So, most blogging software has a tag, label and/or category function. Now, I think what wordpress calls a tag – other software probably has a different name – are basically useless. Bloggers add several tags to each post, usually for the exact topics or persons the post is about. So, if you read a post, you can click on a tag to get other posts about that person. But you could also just search for it. Therefore, tags are essentially search assistance.
Then there are the ‘tag clouds’ with which I have never found anything – perhaps some people like them. (Let me know if you do – I’m curious)
This brings us to categories (or labels, as some call them). These, of course, appear on the sidebar, grouping posts by topic. Categories are great if you want to read about one subject – assuming there is a category for it. There is a problem, though – most bloggers place posts in more than one category. So, you click on one category, read all the posts, click on another category, and – half the posts are the same as in the last category.
The solution, of course, is to place posts in only one category. Blogs would be much improved if this were to happen.