In my ongoing quest to make this silly little blog as reader-friendly as I can, I’ve started adding tags to posts.

I’ve had categories on posts for a couple of years now, and I’m still trying to add them to old posts that go back all five-and-a-half years.  I’ve never used tags because I felt one — either categories or tags — was enough.

But in doing a little bit of blog research, I’ve found that sites like Technorati really like tags.  Categories?  Not so much.  So I thought that by adding tags, I might get a little more traffic, too.  Bonus!

Here’s what’s really different between the two, at least in terms of how I intend to use them:  tags will be much broader in scope.  Categories will remain hyper-focused to the subject matter.

Here’s an example:  let’s say that I do a story about a political fight over the War on Iraq and charges of racism in the military.

The categories I’d likely choose would be “War in Iraq,” “Politics,” “Discrimination,” “Racism,” and “Military.”  That way, if you were looking for any story about discrimination, or only stories that were specifically about race discrimination (as opposed to gender or sexual discrimination), you could select either of the categories.

The tags I’d use would be “Politics” and “Racism.”  It works the same way, but the tags don’t get as specific and I’m limiting the number of tags to two per post, three at absolute most.

There have been posts I’ve written about, say, The Price is Right.  I’m a game show fan, and I know I have some online friends who are big-time ‘Price’ fans as well as fans of game shows in general.  Categories used for a post about Bob Barker’s run of the show would likely include “Television,” “Game Shows,” “CBS,” “The Price is Right,” and “Bob Barker.”  The single tag would be, simply, “TV.”

That way, you can get as specific, or as general, as you care to if you want to know what I have to say on various topics.

The easy way to search either is to go to my sidebar on the right.  The category cloud is in the left column of the sidebar, and the tag cloud is a little lower down on the right.  The categories are arranged by popularity, and the tags are arranged alphabetically, so you’ve got multiple ways to search for multiple choices.

Enjoy!