Experimenting with post labels

This is probably of no real interest to folks, but I've seen other blogs which make use of post labels to group entries by general categories. To be honest, I personally have never bothered to click them to look up blog entries that way, but I'm just curious about how to implement the system since I know that Blogger 2.0 allows such labels. If even a small percentage of my many thousands of readers find the practice useful, well, then it's worth it.

There will be two "hard parts" for me behind the scenes here:

1. Determining exactly what and how many labels may be useful without being too broad or narrow in scope—I don't want to have to use multiple labels on every post or create too many unique niche labels—and...
2. Actually affixing those labels to all prior posts.

The second part isn't technically all that difficult, but it will test my memory in trying to recall what some of my old blathering posts were actually about just based on the titles alone as displayed on my "edit posts" page. I suspect I will have to actually click to re-read more than a few.

By the way, I'm labeling this post (and will soon label others) as "blog tech" which simply will indicate a post explaining something I'm doing with the blog itself that may or may not be noticed in some way by readers, things like adding or removing links from the sidebar or implementing some new feature like (duh!) post labels.

UPDATE

I've done a preliminary pass of attaching labels to posts. It really is difficult to come up with intuitively obvious labels which will minimize overlap (multiple labels on numerous posts). I decided (for now) on seven labels and here's an attempt to generally define them in simple terms:

blog tech—Anything having to do with technical details regarding this particular blog, including things such as general appearance, sidebar items, and possibly even notes on adminstrative behind-the-scenes details.
comics—I'm a fan of the comics page in the daily paper and wherever else strips may be referenced. Note that this label is separate and distinct from "humor" as items categorized in "comics" may be simply news about comics, not necessarily funny in and of themselves.
entertainment—Items having to do with TV or music usually.
humor—These are items whose main intent is simply to provide a chuckle if read as intended.
information—Strictly intended to provide some specific information which I feel may be of interest or use to others.
observation—Opinions and commentary by me about current events, news, whatever may strike my fancy as worth commenting on or having an opinion. May sometimes be of humorous intent.
personal—Items very specific to me and no one else, possibly detailing some current or recent project or anything else directly involving me.

I can't guarantee that these labels won't change by addition, subtraction, or definition, but they're a good enough start. I also can't guarantee I'll always label posts the same way that readers may think I should, but there's no way around that. I doubt that anyone will really avail themselves of these labels anyway, so I'm not going to worry about it too much.

If anyone has suggestions for any changes in my labeling system please feel free to comment and I will take it under advisement.

Finally, as I commented on once before (here) it seems that editing past posts disrupts the order in which they appear in the blog feed. I had hoped that simply adding labels to posts (which I didn't really consider to be editing) would not have the same effect, but it's now apparent to me through viewing my own blog feed on my personalized Google page that it did. Oh well. The feed will correct itself in time as I add new posts.

I may look into the issue again to see if there isn't some way to put the feed order back to rights, but I doubt it. I think there should be an option among the feed settings to present posts in either original post time order or modification time order. Just because you correct some minor issue you happen to come across in an older post doesn't necessarily mean that suddenly that post needs to jump to the front of the feed line. And besides which, edited posts don't automatically jump to the top of the overall blog page itself, so why should they do so in the feed? Feh.