Tag Clouds in Print

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Menard [mailto:codehooliganscodehooligans.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://moviet
ally.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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Tag Clouds in Print

Thread: Tag Clouds in Print