I’m looking for your thoughts now.
There are were about 150 categories accumulated upon my journal over the last few years.
As you can see: I don’t tag, I make everything a category.
Somehow I got it into my head that they were the same thing, and to some degree I still believe they are. But now I am prepared to have ‘converted’ some many categories into tags. WordPress includes this fantastic option, so I felt it prudent and a great opportunity to convert many of my existing categories, and add a whole bunch more then refine them to a select few.
But which ones?
Looking for your thoughts on which of these words are better suited as a “tag” or a “category”.
All of the categories you saw here earlier have now been removed.
This is because many were converted to tags, whereas only a few remain as categories and the main subjects about which I write articles.
I still welcome your thoughts on the issue of ‘category versus tag’.
NEW [03/Sept/2009]
Whilst doing further research into this subject, I found sites that help to successfully convert our tags into categories, or vice versa:
[1] Converting Tags To Categories In WordPress : Using The XML File
[2] WordPress Converting Tags and Categories
Hope that helps you!
Stephentrepreneur.com 
Hello Stephen,
It’s so nice to return here.
I too got carried away with adding various tags, and categories on an entry. In fact I still do it, as I have a set list of categories, which sometimes a blog entry doesn’t seem to fit into. I find the tags easier to use all round, though I need to get down to stripping the categories. Since understanding the difference between the two, I seem to be avoiding categories altogether though still adamant in associating a blog entry in a category. I think the difference category vs tags lies in how the content is organised. With Category it seems that it’s about organising content into one general subject box. Tags are the floating subjects associated with the post itself, that are part of the box. Imagine a leader, and it’ s followers. The category acts as the leader, and the tags as the followers.
That’s one way of looking at it, amongst many.
They key is to not get pulled down with trying to describe your post in every way possible, as when you do it, you begin to realise it belongs in more than one category. That is what keeps happening to me also! At the moment need to get round to sorting this out. I think for the most part, it will stream out the posts and put them into a much more flowing subject manner, rather than have one post come up in every tag or category search, which kind of spoils the purpose of it.
I think the easiest way to cut down a category, would be to get other words that are in association with it, and see your top category like a base and the roots (other words) below it. You will see that one word, can capture the whole i.e. World Wide Web, Art, People etc… I think that Life is a hard one, as there are so many things that encompass it, and to include it you will need to be quite picky at placing entries in that section.
I hope this has helped in some way.
I’m so happy to have stopped by.
Your blog is always a joy to read. :)
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Hello Ana, welcome back!
Sorry about the late response, it’s been a busy week.
Thanks for the in depth response, it makes great reading and learning.
The silly thing is that I have been tagging my artwork on redbubble for the last 3 years without concern.
Seems it is easier to tag images than to tag an article. Your explanation with my thoughts on this issue has made me seen the comparison with Redbubble: Category’s are groups and tags are the descriptive words.
So I plan to keep the top 10 subjects (that most best fit what I talk about) as category’s, and convert all those only used once into tags.
Thanks for reading my article. I see you also have an impressive blog: I will be taking closer attention now!
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Turns out I wrote a similar article about the subject of category’s and tags way back in October 2008. (Discovered whilst adding my archives as individual pages to my site so they will appear in the head-menu.)
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