Tag clouds (a form of Folksonomy) seem to have creeped into web applications all over the internet. First seen on Flickr, tag clouds showed great promise as a novel way to view user trends and graphically showing relative the popularity of tags (think categories, but on steroids). The question I am interested in is: do tag clouds belong in the blogosphere?
The short answer: no, they really don’t.
The real answer goes back to what tag clouds do for the user, what is their purpose? As I said before, tag clouds visually clue a user into the relative popularity of given tags applied to content (which could be blog posts, photos, downloads, whatever). So, lets look at some examples of where tag clouds have been implemented in a great, beneficial way.
Proper Tag Cloud Implementation
Flickr, the originator of tag clouds, has a great feature on their site where the tags that users apply as meta-data to their photos is displayed, showing a browsing user exactly what areas have the most photos, and are most popular. Nearly any repository of information where popularity, or volume of content is what a user cares about (such as del.icio.us links) can benefit from the inclusion of a tag cloud.
Tag Clouds in the Blogosphere
Tag clouds made the transition over to blogs probably because some developer thought it would be a fun plugin to write for their website, and once implemented there, a sort of viral propagation throughout the community took place, as tag clouds clearly have an element of coolness about them. I don’t argue that tag clouds aren’t cool, but let’s assume for a moment that cool doesn’t always mean a better user experience.
The pitfall of tag clouds in blogging is in the implementation. Every single tag cloud plugin I could find weighted the tags merely by the number of posts in it. I suppose this could be useful if a user was trying to figure out what the blog was about, but I think that is rarely the case. The average casual user is looking for information, and the information they are looking for is not always going to be what the author writes about most of the time for most sites.
Michael Heilemann has implemented a pretty good archiving system on his site, allowing user choice. A tag cloud is there, but the more realistic chronological and taxonomical methods are available as well (in fact, they are the default.)
What surprises me is that tag clouds never make it into the administrative portions of bloging tools. If I implemented a tagging structure on northlander.org, I would certanly like to easily select tags for each post… a tag cloud would make it easier for me to pick out the tags that are most likely to apply to my writings. God only knows how Michael wades through all of his tag choices on his WordPress install.
Dan Bowling is a web designer in Missoula, Montana.
Copyright © 2007 Dan Bowling. All rights reserved.