[...] I believe that this approach is not sustainable over time. As the number of categories I’m using increases, it becomes more difficult to scan the possible array of possibilities when I’m making a post. I also find myself reluctant to create new categories and often attempt to “squish” the post into an existing category. The result of this activity is a huge array of topical HTML and RSS repositories that (so far) nobody looks at. [...]
I agree: categories don't scale well, yet fine-grained indexing would be useful. There's a tension there that needs to be resolved. Many good additional points in that post.
This describe exactly how I feel about topic. Topics help order my thoughts but they are not "fine-grained" enough to accurately categorise my posts. They cannot be used easily to create hierarchy of topics, going from coarse-grained to fine-grained. However what I like with topics is you can use more than one per posting. It reminds me of the problem I have to sort my bookmarks: If I put them under a hierarchical category, I am limited to only one unless I want to accepts duplicates.
