"Tag clouds are a rather poor navigational interface" -- Hmmm

bobreb — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:02:00 GMT

So this email shows up in my inbox looking for discussion on the subject of:

"Tag clouds are a rather poor navigational interface"

Discuss...

So I reply.

Okay, I'll bite.

I disagree with the statement principally because it is too broad.

For instance, assuming I know exactly what I'm looking for (an specific fact), and I know how it's represented in some fixed taxonomy (in a library cataloging system for instance), pursuing my object of interest through a set of user generated tags would be a poor choice. Of course, pursuing it through a fixed hierarchy would be less efficient than simply entering detailed search criteria in a relevant search engine and eye-balling the result set.

However, if you're researching a topic, tag clouds can be a fine navigational interface for the same reasons they were weak in the preceding example. Tag clouds make context switching very easy. Tags clouds (as components in a "folksonomic" navigational interface) through clustering/facets, or through simply tracking them back to the people assigning the tags and further explorations therein, often lead to seemingly serendipitous discovery. Though it's perhaps beyond the scope of this discussion, "seemingly serendipitous discovery", while sounding like magic, is in fact something we should expect (and now that we see it should have predicted :-)) from systems that incorporate -- explicitly or implicitly -- the traversal of social spaces.

In other words, a more correct statement would be "Tag clouds can be a rather poor navigational interface, or a very useful navigational interface, depending upon the nature of the navigation -- on perhaps better, the nature of the investigation."

Process of Change : socialsoftware tags

"Tag clouds are a rather poor navigational interface" -- Hmmm