Tags Design

[Skeptical]

Lately tags have become more and more popular, and I'm thinking of implementing it into my system. The thing is, I'm not sure if it's suitable.

 

Basically my application has communities. Currently, each community can be grouped into a category. I create the categories, and individual community moderators can set their communities into their own particular categories.

 

Here are the problems:

• Each community can fit into only one category. I can allow them to choose multiple categories I guess, but I'm not sure if this is the best way.
  
• I would have to create these categories, and may leave out some.
  
• From my experience with the google directory, yahoo directory, and dmoz in general, it seems most people aren't exactly flocking to that idea anymore.

An alternative would be to allow tagging and leave out categories altogether. However, this also has problems:

• How would I list my communities? There's no directory, but just a bunch of tags. I suppose this can work, but should I limit tags to single words, or phrases are ok too?
  
• Tags really shine with the concept of tag clouds or popular tags. However, with communities, I don't know if this is true. After all, this is not like bookmarks, where it can be grouped by popularity. Once a community is set up, that's that.
  

 

What are your thoughts regarding this?

[Daniel0]

Tags might work out ok with your site. You could make the tags one-word-only or phrases, your choice - both will work out fine. As for the tag cloud: I think (correct me if I'm wrong), that most times the tag cloud is generated from how many objects having that tag, and not the popularity of the objects themselves. If you are worrying about the directory listing, then you could retain the categories (allow multiple) along with the tags, or else you could allow users to search for tags.