Some dictionary.com wisdom:

• Topic
• The subject of a speech, essay, thesis, or discourse.
• Tag
• A strip of leather, paper, metal, or plastic attached to something or hung from a wearer's neck to identify, classify, or label
• Category
• A specifically defined division in a system of classification; a class.
• Classification
• A category or class.

I'm happy to see so much excitement around Technorati's new "tags" feature. Really.

We have been thinking about this kind of stuff for quite a while. For example this is a pretty old post which tries to explain how we are approaching this issue within our application.

I'm not sure that what we call "topics" is the same thing of what is now called "tags". I think that they are, but then on Technorati I see tags compared to categories, and I don't think that topics are categories.

Anyway, I want to move forward with ENT (maybe rename it Easy News Tags? ;-) and see if it can be of any help in this process.

I think that the next big step are going to be tools. In these years we came up with a few solutions to help users to choose and add topics to what they write which we will be happy to share.

Dave: If you're in NY and have some time to kill, and haven't seen Phantom [of The Opera] yet, take a ride on the subway instead. It's more entertaining.

Uh... if you are anywhere else in the world I guess Dave is right. If you are in New York you might want to check out the real thing.