[Sigia-l] Tag Clouds in Print

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Menard [mailto:codehooligans at codehooligans.com] 
> Sent: 05 January 2007 16:21
> To: Jonathan Baker-Bates
> Cc: SIGIA-L
> Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Tag Clouds in Print
> 
> Jonathan,
> 
> Just curious. You provided bad examples of Tag Clouds.Just 
> wondering if you might have some good examples. I work with 
> more and more clients that are requesting Tag Clouds for 
> blog/news content on their site. Would like to get some 
> thoughts on good implementations.
> 

I was looking at movietally.com the other day. While it's not exactly a
shining example of good design overall, the use of the tag cloud struck
me as particularly good when applied to the movie pages:

http://movietally.com/movie.php?id=3537

The cloud is much more effective than reading a synopsis. Through the
power of user-generated tags, I can also get clues about the film I
would not otherwise obtain (eg lots of users tagging a film as "boring"
or "left wing").

The del.icio.us tag cloud is a lesser example, but still good:
http://del.icio.us/tag/ The cloud tells you instantly that del.icio.us
users are all geeks. No "baseball", "makeup" or "upholstery" here. Job
done.

A more common example though would be for news sites where you can get a
feel for the kinds of stories that are prevalent at any one time. I've
always felt these to be of more marginal use since they tend not to be
using user-generated tags, so the insight they provide is limited -
they're serving more as another type of navigation. The same applies to
tag clouds on blogs - only as effective as tags and often don't reveal
very much. I see the Observer blogs
(http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/) have dropped their tag clouds
in favour of simple category navigation. The IA in charge of that site
(Ben Hammersley) is a bit of a god in my opinion (and smokes a pipe),
and I can see that's a good move.

On a slightly more analytical note about the size of the tags in the
cloud, I would think most people would not parse out more than about
four attributes: present (in the cloud), important, less important,
insignificant and absent (the tag is not in the cloud). Differentiating
the sizes by more than that would be futile.

Can't find any other good examples. Maybe they're mostly awful.

Jonathan





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