There’s this list of categories on the right side of my blog. And it’s starting to annoy me. I don’t post on baseball much these days; does it deserve its own category? Go started as a category, got deleted, got added back. In my last post, I started to think that I should add a category “lean”, but then I thought I should also add a category “agile”, but then I quailed at the thought at going back through my posts (hey, this one is post 501! Though that count probably includes a handful of deleted ones) to try to reclassify them correctly. And I’d just end up with tons of posts labeled as lean/agile/programming/managing.

And really, what’s the point? I suppose it’s vaguely possible that somebody will find a post of mine somehow, click on the front page, get dismayed the other random crap I write about, but persevere to at least read posts on her favorite topic; unlikely, though. Indeed, I’m not sure that humans are the intended users of the categories at all: it’s probably part of the whole “semantic web” idea. Which I don’t have particularly strong positive feelings towards, and I don’t think has played out too well in practice. Tagging is doubtless helpful if you’re, say, posting videos on YouTube; but I don’t see how it’s helpful for my blog. If non-regular readers are going to find random stuff here that they’re interested in, they’ll do so via search, not via my categories.

Still, I haven’t made up my mind completely: I don’t want to lightly throw away 500 posts worth of categorization. I’ll think about it for a while.

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