Labels

When I first started blogging I was delighted to figure out how to attach labels to my posts.  I began to rapidly accumulate a long list of labels.  One for every post it seemed sometimes.  So then I merged a few similar ones, went back through old posts and corrected them and things were fine for a while.  It's one thing to go through a few months worth of posts and redo them.

The first time I went through a phase where every single post seemed to have the label "unloading brain", I started to feel bad about only ever seeming to choose that label and so I just stopped.  And although I have occasionally since then assigned labels to posts, by and large I really haven't.  And it'd be a whole other thing to go through what is now more than six years of posts.  I'll get around to it one day, but it may be a while.

I find myself wondering what the optimum number of labels is, if there even is such a thing and would be interested to hear others views on this. My instinct is that somewhere between ten and twenty might be a good number.  On the one hand, I'd like to have labels general enough that you don't need to create dozens of sub-sets just to accurately cover what you're writing about.  On the other, a too general label that will present you with dozens of posts to search through on any one area is not necessarily the best thing either.  Do you use labels on your blog?  Have you restricted it to a certain number or do you just keep adding new ones as they occur to you?  Do you use labels when reading someone else's blog in order to read posts on a topic you're particularly interested in or to find a particular post that you remember?  I'm really interested to hear what other people think about this.