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Tag Clouds are Visual Indices!
Steve Poland (a regular at TechCrunch) has a blog called Techquila Shots that is a fun read. He does a drive-by on what he calls the Stupidest Web Feature Ever Created: Tag Clouds:
Tag clouds are the stupidest creation on the web I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been on the web. I don’t use tag clouds — and I can’t imagine anyone that does. A list of unsorted single words, some bigger than others? Does nothing for me — the only words that are ever going to catch my attention in a tag cloud are ones that might swing me into “I’m a male” mode, such as “Jennifer Love Hewitt Naked”. Otherwise, a random assortment of words just distracts me, doesn’t make me focus in on one of them or give me more ideas of what I could be looking at. If I’m looking for something, I do a search for it.
As pointed out in his comments, tag clouds are sorted alphabetically. They are most useful as value-added indices of otherwise disparate content, telling one not only what subjects are covered by a given set of content, but also which of those subjects have a greater intensity of content. They are not infinitely useful, but they are helpful. I use one here on our internal knowledgebase to keep tabs on the subjects we are writing about, partially to make sure we have a balance of documentation among the various areas of integration.
Personally, I find them a good value-add, made moreso when mouseovers reveal the actual number of articles/posts/whatever that are associated with the tag.
April 16th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
I think tag clouds are a useful compliment to structured taxonomies. I think they work best as a mechanism for allowing users to annotate content on a site and for them to slice thru the prevailing data/navigation structures to get where they want to go. But I don’t think they scale well for large amounts of data/content or for sites where people need to find stuff other than what is most popular.
And I think site owners/designers are taking tagging/folksonomies too far as an organizing framework - in some cases to the point of not using structured taxonomies at all. I think this often comes from a sense of taxonomies being an old technique, and therefore, quite useless, rather than an objective look at what will do the job best. I just read a really funny and insightful post to this effect (which I can’t lay my hands on at the moment).
Example: I recently met a company that is building an online B2B marketplace for unstructured information requests. They were planning to use a tag cloud as their only navigation mechanism, despite there being 2-3 obvious (and simple) frameworks that could easily have been built into the design. For any number of reasons, I argued that they should incorporate both tagging AND the structured frameworks. They looked at me like I was from another planet.