Don’t Classify better use Tags

I was just remembering a conversation I had with a friend of mine at 2010 about classification. He told me the use of categories in a blog makes no sense and I decide to defend the opposite using the species classification, he only smiled and replied: “well, where do you put to the platypus?”

That made me think a lot and every time I was thinking about ways to classify something, I tried to change to use another method, like tags.

But… why tags?

Tags are a way to identify some specific part of the element in other way you classify but with the improvement you can add more and different tags. For example, you can create tags based on dates, other tags based on people and other ones based on places. Then you can classify some content using all of them: date, people and place.

But even you can add more. For example, events or topics. You can even use different tags from the same type for the same content. Imagine you are classifying photos and you are using dates like years or even month+year. But the event “New Year’s Eve Party”… have different tags for dates: december2017 and january2018, both. And of course you can add many tags about people.

Ok, use tags for photos makes sense… and even blog entries… have you got other place where to use them? Of course! Mails. And even that kind of organisation is possible at this moment using some clients like GMail. In this case you can use tags to mark incoming emails and filter them to see only specific emails when you are searching for them.

One use I do is about the places where I’m. At this moment I’m living in Amsterdam, but I was in UK before. I have to organise my incoming emails regarding to the legal information from both places but even, depending on the kind, I can use some other tags like: children, taxes, move, legal, …

Concluding… I think this is a good approach, maybe I’m late and most of the people at this moment are using it, but I have to share :-)