How Tag Clouds Suck and struggling for an intelligent design of ‘Aboutness’

Some time long ago, back when the last of the compact discs still roamed the earth, when Web 2.0 was first shimmying it’s glassy, bubbly, lime-green flippery toe out out of that primordial soup of long-shattered dotcom dreams, there was, at that time, The Tag Cloud.

And the Geeks saw the tag cloud. And the geeks said it was good.

And boy they were wrong about that. really wrong. And like Chlamydia, it spread.

Somehow this sexy-looking, but, -in reality- sordidly abused miscarriage of functional information design became the standard bearer of Web 2.0. Yep, pump up your form size elements, round those corners, slap tag Tag cloud on ‘er and you got yerself a Web 2.0 app.

So there was a reason. The reason is that tag clouds are supposed to convey a sense of “aboutness”. Oh are you new around here? here, take a glance at this, you can “see” what this place, person, blog, group, whatever is about by checking the tag cloud. Right…

But tag “clouds” suck. You can feel this is true in that pained space in your forebrain as your eyes grapple desperately to make sense of jumbled mess of disconnected semantics.

Tag clouds are like what if I said I was going to write this paragraph -but instead of in the regular order- I would put all of the words in alphabetical order instead. But then I’ll adjust the size of words I think are important in a highly arbitrary way. Wouldn’t that be awesome?!

I’ve not wanted to have to write this post for a long time. But people are *still* coming out with new sites loaded with tag clouds. So if you must have this feature to suggest “aboutness”, here’s what I would suggest (if this reminds you of last.fm there’s good reason, maybe the only sane tag using site on the internet)

Let’s take technorati’s data and replot it:

Hey now we can see not just what tags are more “about” this blog, but also in proper order, and by how much each differ. At a glance. If space is a premium, here’s how you might shave a few pixels and still convey all the data while squeezing it in a sidebar.

Anyway, this is my best efforts. let me know if you have inspirations.

File under “Tag Clouds: the Mullets of Web Design or Ontological Venereal Affliction?”

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