Cow’s Blog

May 11th, 2006

One of the "web 2.0" "innovations" I’m not really a fan of are tag clouds as they are overused especially where using a tag cloud is illogical. According to Wikipedia:

A tag cloud (more traditionally known as a weighted list in the field of visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.

Tag clouds look messy. I mean, look at Digg’s cloud.

Tag clouds are generally there to filter information - to view a subset of the information, for example all forum posts related to a certain subject. Looking at Wordpress’ tags, the largest and most popular tags also happen to be the most generic and the most useless.

The idea behind tag clouds is that if there are more forum posts about "javascript", more people will probably be looking for it. If more people are looking for them, they should be larger so they are easier to see. I don’t agree with this; ordering tags by popularity could allow people to find posts about "javascript" just as easily. If someone is just glancing at a forum and looking for something interesting to talk about, this approach would work.

Alternatively if someone was looking for information about a specific topic such as "php", they might as well just type "php" rather than looking down a tag cloud.

I’m just not sure what problems tag clouds are solving and how they are at all useful. Reading over what I’ve written I don’t think I’ve communicated my point particularly well; perhaps readers could chip in and let me know what they think about tag clouds and whether they find them useful.

• Web 2.0
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