design, cities, physical & social interaction, play

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Next Generation Tag Clouds

Joe Lamantia recently published a two-part essay on tag clouds. He’s managed to create a nice primer on tagging from an IA’s point of view. His tone of voice is a bit academic, which may turn you off, but his predictions of future directions for tagging and tag clouds are spot on quite interesting.

A while ago I tried to come to grips with the tagging phenomenon in a series of posts on open.info.nl (in Dutch). The last one was on facetted tagging. Lamantia briefly mentions this as a new direction, but doesn’t really describe how he imagines this would work.

I’m in the planning phase of a facetted tagging demo, and still not sure how to approach it: should content editors specify the facets within which content users can tag, or should the facets be tags as well. In other words – how far should we go in relinquishing control over metadata?

Related posts:

  1. Construction Continues – Tag Cloud in the Archives
  2. Odeo’s Launched
  3. Rough Notes for Jesse James Garrett – Keynote


2 Comments

[..] his predictions of future directions for tagging and tag clouds are spot on

How do you know? Are you some kind of psychic? If so, can you give me some more future directions? ;-) Should I turn left or right?

Posted by Edgar on 9 March 2006 @ 3pm

Sigh — I’m sorry Edgar, my English is, as always, quite spotty.

Oh, and be sure to turn left. Just not now. ;-)

Posted by Kars on 9 March 2006 @ 3pm