Jeffrey Zeldman’s recent post on tag clouds has gotten some play elsewhere, but not here so I thought I’d mention it. It’s not quite as spot-on as his usual commentary, but it raises an interesting question about tag clouds: are they making good use of Fitts’ Law or just reinforcing herd behaviour?
The idea behind tag clouds is that users know best. Their actions determine how other users navigate. Their choices leave a trail. Typically, though not always, the “important” topics get big while those considered less important (which in this case only means less popular) get small. Once they get small enough, they disappear.
In Flickr and Technorati, users create their own tags (“design,” “cats,” “California”). When enough people have used the same tag, it begins to show up in the cloud. Once a lot of people have used it, it becomes a visually dominant element, encouraging others to click it — and subtly discouraging them from creating their own tags.
Beyond the cloud there are many interesting ways we could visualize the, um, tag-geist if you will. What about tag abandonment, or clustering by social group, or unique users, or changes in frequency? Obviously there’s lots of room for innovation here.
Aside: the del.icio.us shades-of-red technique gets my vote as the best popularity interface. It’s subtle, effective and actually useful.
I found Zeldman’s post a little too anti-popularity. I think that, because of high school or other experiences with popularity, we have learned to hate it.
However, it still drives most of the decisions that we make everyday. For example, most people read Zeldman’s post not because it was well-written or well-argued, but because he’s popular and as a result an authority on web design. I found the reader comment “Yeah, let’s not promote the herd-mentality” quite ironic, given that the herd-mentality is to be anti-popular. Only a few people get to enjoy popularity. The rest of us complain.
Despite that, I think that popularity serves a valuable role in our attention economy. To listen to what is popular isn’t to fail to think for ourselves (which is the common argument), we ultimately make that decision. Indeed, by inspecting what is popular (tag clouds, in this case), we can learn a lot about the world we live in. It’s easy to watch the herd without running with it.
Comment by Joshua Porter — May 16, 2005 @ 10:52 am
Popularity is only easily measurable on the scope of a particular domain. When you have tag soup like Flicker, del.icio.us, etc, it loses meaning, it’s not popularity, it’s just a relationship between frequency and volume.
Seasonality and Content Quality. That’s what I want to see these tools being capable of addressing. Content Quality and Relevancy are different things even though the majority of people treat them as the same (specially from a search engine perspective).
Quality is also dependable on the type of content and its context of use. You could even argue that content quality is an attribute of the content genre.
Seasonality is another interesting aspect as some topics may be more or less relevant depending on events and dates - but I haven’t seen any services taking advantage of that yet.
Comment by livlab — May 22, 2005 @ 11:15 pm