@ Anke: Thanks for the tips, I'm sticking to wordpress.com for now though, so they're not really tweakable. I've got one tag cloud, so if I wanted to make divided list, I have to do it manually on a separate page with just basic html. I don't know much about site coding, but I think Wordpress.com is kind of like Apple with regards to UI. Stay with our streamlined design or get out. Hilariously enough, I am typing this on my Macbook.
@Giggleton: That's a neat idea, but the problem is that it assumes that there would be enough users that would participate. There's tagging on Amazon and Smashwords (don't know if it's readers who can tag on Smashwords), but not enough people do it to be really effective. I'll let the big sites deal with that, but for now, I'm just thinking about internal browsing in my blog with the trope tags displayed in some sort of visual form. Looking at some older mobileread posts, Ficbot was looking at a tagging system via delicious to browse through books on the free book sites:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=84646. That's an interesting global view of looking at tagging instead of looking at tags within the site.
@icedtea: Great category/tag idea. I'll consider that.
Hmm, so just to outline again the main purposes of finding a good category/tagging system:
(1) Improve search engine love. Tag similar works in pop culture (e.g. movies, comics) that it could be compared to, the author's name, so reviews of indie author's work would be found even if the searcher was looking for a more popular work. Also includes tags that improves search engine love that's specific for the blog (e.g. ebook reviews).
(2) Improve browsing by tags so readers can find archived reviews they'd be interested in, in such a way that is more enjoyable and intuitive than manual chronological archived-month post browsing or a search bar search.
If I were to tag author's names, similar works in pop culture, and other search engine love terms, it would create "noise" in the default sidebar tag cloud.
I can't say I've used tag clouds to browse through other book blogs because I generally see tag clouds that are
(1) too overwhelmingly big and of different categories (but now I understand these book blogs are doing the search engine love thing, probably not for internal navigation).
(2) too much "noise" in the form of author's names that I don't recognize, or redundant phrases.
Internal tag browsing: signal vs. noise.
Tagging an author's name for the purpose of internal navigation doesn't make sense in an indie book blog.
If you're looking for more reviews of the author, you'd already know the author's name to type it out on the search bar. I don't think I was ever compelled to look at other posts about the author just by looking at the author's name. Since indie authors aren't well known, their names alone isn't going to compel someone to look through their reviews. But I think someone would be enticed if they see genre-specific tags: steampunk, superhero, dark fantasy, or trope-tags: gadgeteer genius, girl's got moxie, arrakis seems more habitable.
Internal tag browsing: redundancy
I see a lot of book blogs that have "books" or "kindle" or "reviews" on their tags, and I was baffled by why they'd put tags on like that when it's -clearly- a book blog. I used to think that tags used were for internal browsing only, which is why I always wondered why bloggers cluttered their tag clouds. Now I understand that it's for search engine love, but it clutters the tag cloud as a form of archived post browsing, which makes me not use the tag cloud.
So going back to icedtea's category/tag suggestion, given I'm sticking with wordpress.com in the near future, here's two options I thought of:
(1) Use the sidebar tag cloud for internal browsing via trope-tags, and move all search-engine-love terms (e.g. similar works, authors) in to categories/sub categories. Also put subgenre/genre terms (dark fantasy, steampunk) on a custom side menu as a category.
(2) Use tags for everything... trope tags and search engine love terms, but the tag cloud isn't designed for internal browsing. Instead, internal browsing by trope tags would be replaced by a separate wordpress page (which I link to on the side) where I manually input each trope-tag and link to it. This separate page won't be a tag cloud, more like a massive list.
Right now, I'm leaning towards option 1. Option 2 requires more manual tweaking and would probably result in a massive list that no one would access (because it won't be on the side bar) or use (because it would be a massive list w/o any larger text to distinguish the tags that are used more often).
Thoughts? It seems kind of funny to have such a long discussion on basically, tagging and categorizing on a wordpress blog, but you know, it's all in the name of search engine love, better UI, and indie promotion and stuff.