2 Comments

1. Ryan  •  Feb 22, 2008 @2:42 pm
   

   Thanks for the mention, Anthony. Since writing that post I’ve been waiting for the axe to fall in the form of some brilliant tag cloud implementation I can’t dispute.

   None have been forthcoming, but now I’m starting to want to find one, just because I hate statements without exceptions. Do let me know if something comes up for you. Cheers.

2. bill  •  May 30, 2008 @9:53 am
   

   Tag clouds seem like a waste of UI real estate to me. I have yet to understand their usefulness. If you want to indicate something as somehow more relevant than something else, that is what sorting is for. Rather than seeing things in a larger font to indicate some arbitrary relevance, I’d rather sort my list to see things in that particular order. Whomever decided what the relevance is (most matches under that keyword?) is someone who implemented the system and presumes that this information is of interest to the user. But I, as a user, may approach a given UI with a different intention in mind at different times. I want control over what I see and what is relevant to me. If I am looking for something, that is what the search functionality is.
   Give me a search feature that provides a list of results that I can sort by relevance. Tag clouds are just unnecessary clutter on a page that is distracting, unsightly and, basically, useless. I can’t think of a single implementation in which a tag cloud is actually useful. I think it was just one of those ideas that maybe SEEMED like a good thing to somebody, perhaps because it is different and stands out (for sure, for sure), but it’s really more like a novelty item that everyone looks at but nobody buys.
   Web 2.0 offers so many more useful and helpful options that making a decision to incorporate a tag cloud into a UI is simply near-sighted.

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