Managing Categories

Joseph A. di Paolantonio recently blogged how he re-organized his categories to use technorati tags and is hoping to move toward a better fine-tuned folksonomy.

While i belive this is useful, I still see a few factors that I hope taghop.ORG can address when looking to perform such an activity.

1. There are relationships between most of the tags/categories you associate with your content. Even when using a single folksonomy, it would be useful to be able to add a few key tags and inherit relationships with other items via their tags relationships rather than adding every tag to your post.
2. These are fine if everyone uses a single system, but it is fact and always will be that people will use distributed folksonomies and whilst a single source can be useful for a certain domain, it can be hugely useful to be able to relate and reuse distributed folksonomies
3. Finally, there is an inheritance of how you relate things. You may not TAG something directly, but there may be an inference that it is related to some other tag. These may not be the same semantic meaning, but rather a "if you are interested in this kind of thing, you may be interested in that kind of thing".

I have contacted Joseph to get his feedback and will post what he comes back to say.

Early days, but always useful to start talking with the people who are hopefully looking for some kind of solution to simple problems they have found like this!