Can people zero-in on archived material in your blog? For Blogger bloggers, the usual answer was “no”. A reader could only sift through a day, week or month’s worth of old posts at a time, unable to search by topic.

But times are changing. As mentioned in yesterday’s post, Blogger beta offers labels (categories) — a much needed tool for retrieving old blog posts.

There was at least one solution to the old Blogger category problem. Ever since I found this workaround from Blogger Tips and Tricks, I’ve used del.icio.us tagrolls for my blogs, like so–

del.icio.us tagrolls have their pros and cons–but so do Blogger beta labels. I’m not sure which is better.

1. If you look at the del.icio.us link above, you’ll see all my posts in the category “Marketing” on a neat summary page. The descriptive information below each post title is fully customizable. If you sees something of interest, you click on the post to read it. No summary page with Blogger labels. Instead, clicking on a category displays all the associated posts in their entirety. So although you get all the information on your screen with one click, you might have to scroll through lots of posts to find what you want. Which approach is easier for the reader overall? Not sure.

2. Tagging posts (i.e., assigning categories) is ten times faster using Blogger labels.

3. On the other hand–renaming, reassigning, or removing categories is a breeze with del.icio.us. So far, I don’t see a way to rename categories at all in Blogger; reassigning or removing them is cumbersome.

4. Both methods easily handle assigning multiple categories to individual posts.

5. Both methods update the blog’s sidebar in real time.

6. Multi-word categories in del.icio.us tags look clumsy. (As far as I can figure, you have to use a hyphen or underscore to separate words. With Blogger label–no problem.

No doubt we can expect further improvements in the Blogger beta platform. For business blogs–where sorting content by topic is indispensable–the improvements are already significant.