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andrewduckerI'm amused to discover that there's a book called Shatnerquake, set at Shatnercon, where a group of Bruce Campbell fans commit an act of terrorism.
I'm confused as to why Amazon's sales rank puts it at:
#45 in Books Humour Fiction
#6 in Books Fiction Humour
Why on earth do they have two separate categories that should produce the same thing, and how do they produce different results???
I'm confused as to why Amazon's sales rank puts it at:
#45 in Books Humour Fiction
Why on earth do they have two separate categories that should produce the same thing, and how do they produce different results???
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Date: 2010-07-18 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 07:02 pm (UTC)Actually if that's the case then that probably ranks as an exceptionally poor user interface on the discombobulation side of things :)
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Date: 2010-07-18 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 08:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 08:52 am (UTC)Tags, on the other hand, are independent from one another, so that "Fiction,Humour" would be the interection of all the entries with both tags attached. The advantage of this is that you can ask the question in any order and get the same result, and nobody has to actually design your ontology in advance.
For example:
http://delicious.com/andrewducker/uk+funny
and
http://delicious.com/andrewducker/funny+uk
both produce a page with the same links in it.
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Date: 2010-07-19 12:40 pm (UTC)You're saying it's technical: categories have a hierarchy, tags have none.
The other guy seems to be saying it's more semantic -- categories are thought out, tags are descriptions, sort of.
The way I use the terms, or rather, Drupalspeak, is that categories are admin-defined, tags are created on the fly when you just type a word or phrase.
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Date: 2010-07-19 12:46 pm (UTC)The difference, semantically, is purely that objects are _in_ categories, but have tags _attached_ to them. Something can only be in one category, but it can have as many tags attached as you like.
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Date: 2010-07-19 01:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 01:19 pm (UTC)If you can have as many tags as you like for something then there's no need to create them all up-front. If you are constrained to one category per object then you either need to get your ontology sorted proprly up-front or you end up with a massive mess.
Categories -> Can only be in one bucket at any one time, therefore have edge cases, therefore need to get define them up front, therefore don't allow users to create their own.
Tags -> Can be tagged as many times as you like, therefore no edge cases, therefore no need to define up-front, there can allow users to define as you go.
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Date: 2010-07-19 01:26 pm (UTC)But nothing precludes categories from being multiple-select ;)
Though I am trying to remember if I've ever set some of those up. Quite probably.
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Date: 2010-07-19 01:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 12:13 pm (UTC)A nice example I read recently was how The Library of Congress has put thousands of photos on Flickr. Their curators organised by categories, such as period and place - perfectly reasonable. But it's also entirely reasonable to want to search for pictures of women with red hats - 'hat' is a great tag as is 'red', but it would be impossible to categorise photos in advance that way.
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Date: 2010-07-18 06:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 06:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 05:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 06:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 08:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 08:48 am (UTC)