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.

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.