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?

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Kars Alfrink

Kars is a designer, researcher and educator focused on emerging technologies, social progress and the built environment.

2 thoughts on “Next generation tag clouds”

  1. [..] 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?

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

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

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