Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

I know…lets throw a whole bunch of words/phrases on the screen, slammed together in different sizes, call it a tag cloud, sit back, prop our feet up on the table and pat ourselves on the back for a good “Web 2.0” job well done.

I find tag clouds useless.  They look messy.  I scan over them and only the largest/boldest tags stick out, in which case it seems like the presentation of the cloud is going to reinforce the content by encouraging more clicks on the already most popular links.

Give me well-structured information architecture backed up with a search engine any day.

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

1. AJP on March 21, 2006

   I’d have to agree. One variation that I have seen that I like much better than the horrible jumble of words is the one at Michael Heilemann’s Binary Bonsai (http://binarybonsai.com/archives/). It visually tells me what’s most popular without overloading my view.

2. Frank Johnson on March 21, 2006

   So what’s your opinion of tagging in general? By the way, totally agree about tag clouds.

3. Michael Boyink (Author) on March 21, 2006

   Hey Frank - I’m still undecided on the whole folksonomy/tagging thing.

   My experience over the years with any kind of “Shared organizing” has been terrible—just look at any shared filespace within any company for evidence.  Unless there is a person dedicated to keeping it organized it quickly becomes a unusable combination of different organizational approaches.

   But I also know that I tend to be a “non-joiner” by nature…:)

   I’ve played around with some of the web 2.0 tools that use tagging, but can’t say any of them have become anything more than interesting interface widgets.  None of them are part of my daily routine, nor have I implemented anything similar for client work.

4. Frank Johnson on March 23, 2006

   I guess I’m just curious about the effectiveness of tagging for building traffic.

   For example, say I had a blog about Raggedy-Ann dolls (which I don’t!) and wrote an article about rare blue-haired Raggedy-Ann dolls. If I were to then add a link to that article in my del.icio.us account and tag it with “blue hair raggedy ann,” could I potentially gain additional readers (who would presumably be affionados of blue-haired Raggedy Ann dolls) for my blog?

   I’m not sure I see the advantage of tagging as a way to classify information (as versus search engines, for example), but if it can bring more readership, is it another PR method which can be effective? Just thinking out loud more than anything else. I’m not sure what I think, either, but I’ve been contemplating the idea a bit.

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