The Net: Categories, Labels, Tags, Whatever

I really can't believe that Blogger doesn't offer built-in support for labels, categories, tags, or some other sort of categorization for blog posts. I think it would be really nice to choose a label for my posts - politics, google, random thoughts, music, tv - and then have a menu on the right side of the page that lists all of the categories. Similar to the "archive" section which breaks posts down by month, the "categories" section would break them down by label. So clicking on "politics" would lead you to every post I've ever made on the topic. Being the nerd that I am, I would of course go back and attempt to categorize every post I have ever made. In the meantime, I will start titling posts in the following fashion: "Label: Post Title." This should give me a head start when I finally have a labeling solution that works. I have recently signed up to test out labelr, which aims to provide categorization functionality.

Another way to solve this would be to integrate Blogger directly in to Gmail. I think this is coming, since there has been so little work done on Blogger itself lately. Wouldn't it be nice to have "Compose Mail" and "Compose Post" right next to each other? You could even make "p" the keyboard shortcut to go to the compose post screen. Then you could label each post using Gmail's excellent label implementation. Another plus would be that all your posts - like all your e-mails and Gtalk chats - would be saved in the familiar Gmail interface. The labels could be used only internally (so you could find your own posts at a later date) or both internally and externally so the labels show up in your blog (and in a navigational menu). Wow, what a cool idea.

Well, Google, what do you think...?