Is tagging is the best user friendly way to categorize a subject?

Is tagging is the best user friendly way to categorize a subject? An example would be the tags mechanism used in this Q/A site. (StackOverflow.com). How you would Implement categories in a best user friendly way? Or hierarchical categories are the best user friendly way to present available categories?

Is there any online store use tag to categor开发者_如何学Cize product categories?

What you want depends on the nature of the media being categorized.

If you're working primarily with media that is difficult to index, like images, audio, or video, then you want a loose tagging system that encourages putting as many tags as possible with each item. The more tags the merrier, because you will need to use the tags to help index the content for searching.

For something that is more easily indexed (text!), you want a much more rigid system where it may take an extra step or two to create new categories or even force users choose from pre-defined categories. You no longer need to rely on user-supplied tags for search indexing, because you can index the content directly. You are strictly doing categorization, and for categorization to have meaning you need to be sure that users are sorting things into the same categories.

Whether or not a hierarchy or tree structure is appropriate depends on how well your categories fit into a tree structure. Some things fit better than others, and many things that appear to fit a tree structure (like programming topics) turn out not to be such a good fit after all.

I say yes!

Tagging provides a many to many relationship between questions and categories. It makes them loosely coupled and so gives control as well as flexibility for categorizing things.

Tagging has the advantage that a single post can belong to more than one category. This is not possible with (conventional) hierarchical structures. Tagging is a more powerful system than hierarchical categorizing - and so it allows the users to express more.

A hierarchical structure works better if you have a single editor who will spend the time to neatly categorize everything so that a menu structure can be created.

I think tagging works well when things can/need not be strictly categorized or require a hierarchy. It's kind of a non-relational way of relating things.

If works, tags should be controlled or filtered (e.g. crystalreports vs crystal-reports).
Retiring duplicate tags & migrating subject to a proper category will require human intervention.

I don't know of any store that use tagging. Static attributes can be categorized (Electronics -> Camera -> SLR). There could be other attributes, which are dynamic (price range between x and y) & those are not tagged.

Amazon has tags as well. I think, its search option has one choice where it says "get products tagged with" & gives you a box to put in your idea of what a tag could be (which shows you a dropdown of tags, it finds matching - same as stackoverflow).

Tagging can be very useful in every case. For example, gmail applies tags to all emails. Tags could be predefined (with a fixed meaning), or user generated. Having those predefined tags is important as they work like categories, can be controlled by the store owners, and still don't force you to use a hierarchy. You can emulate a category system with tags by enforcing some specific rules on the type of allowable tags, but you can't go the other way round with hierarchical categories.

So, for example, to find all incoming emails on gmail, we can search by the inbox tag.

tag:inbox

Or to get all unread emails in the inbox, we can search by two tags:

tag:inbox && tag:unread

It's much better than trying to categorize in possibly this fashion, for example:

/Inbox
/Inbox/Unread
/Inbox/Spam

Not that anyone cares about spam (the actual ones), but spam can be unread too. So should we introduce another sub-category called Unread inside Spam, or do some other restructuring within Inbox itself?

/Inbox/Spam/Unread

Another store-specific example could be to find all SLR cameras on Amazon that uses compact flash for storage, and supports RAW, and JPEG formats, we could theoretically use:

tag:camera && tag:SLR && tag:Compact-Flash && tag:RAW-format && tag:JPEG-format

Categorization forces you to choose a hierarchy which might mean you have to pick one between two or more perfectly reasonable choices. For example, is an iPod Touch a music player, or a video player, or maybe a portable computer, or all of it?

its depend on the context, if you want to make structure clear and controllable you should force it by your pre-defined category, but if you want to make it flexible and make easier for your user tag is the best technique to manage subject, furthermore it makes search engine easier to analyse and provides better results

so my answer if you asking for user friendliness it would be tags.