My personal favourite would be to have 10 or so official sub HNs and not to allow people to create their own.
My list would include Entrepreneurship, Tech Web, Tech Other
I'd be happy with a minimalist two-way split: one category for mainly technical articles (new languages, language tutorials, code releases, review-my-app requests, in-depth articles on the state of some technology, etc.), and a second category for mainly business, startup, political, or meta-type news (X got bought, tips on productivity, VC term sheets, management styles, etc.).
What categories would you suggest? Business, technology, environment, programming, apple, facebook? Ok, probably not apple and facebook though those do get an inordinate amount of links.
Personally I wouldn't use them, and my concern would be that people who come only to read articles tagged in that column wouldn't cross-polinate their expertise into cross-over areas.
Just a thought.