Comments on: Tag Clouds are Visual Indices! http://www.raydeck.com/2007/04/tag-clouds-are-visual-indices/ Startup perspective on the business of technology Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:52:43 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.1 by: John Kenney http://www.raydeck.com/2007/04/tag-clouds-are-visual-indices/#comment-5069 Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:54:51 +0000 http://www.raydeck.com/2007/04/tag-clouds-are-visual-indices/#comment-5069 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. 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.

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