Tag Clouds: A Gloomy Forecast?

Tag clouds, commonly found on social bookmarking sites like Technorati, del.ici.ous, and Flickr are a visual depiction of either the number of times that a tag has been applied to a single item or, more commonly, the number of items to which a tag has been applied. Most tag clouds are arranged alphabetically and more significant tags (those that are most often used by members of the tagging community) are depicted in a larger font, different color, or using some other form of emphasis.

Tag clouds are truly the product of a Web 2.0 approach to the organization of knowledge. Some of the benefits often cited for using tag clouds include:

- allowing users a non-linear form of content browsing, facilitating the discovery of new resources.

- allowing users to easily monitor and visualize the research and tagging trends of a community.

- instantly adapting to new usages of language and categorization through the use of folksonomies.

Some deficiencies of tag clouds as a classification system for serious researchers include:

- little or no visual connection between related tags, common concepts, or subcategories of major topics.

- indicating popularity (or some other metric) by font size, color, weight, etc. gives the user only a very vague idea about the relative quality or quantity of materials associated with the tag.

- non-hierarchical systems of classification usually do not convey the important relationships between records that hierarchical systems do.

- folksonomies can suffer from the fact that general users tag inconsistently (sometimes using singular or plural), inaccurately (misspellings), and often for their own purposes (Ex. using tags like “things to buy,” instead of using title, author, subject terms).

- tag clouds make inefficient use of space on a Web page, so they are limited to displaying only a limited number of terms. What tags are you missing?

- many users who first look at a tag cloud are confused by a list of seemingly random terms in different fonts. Most sites do a poor job of describing exactly how their clouds work and the best techniques for navigation and discovery.

Recently, social bookmarking sites have begun adding a number of “options” to their tag clouds in order to help users gain more control over how their information is organized and presented. Del.ici.ous users, for example, can view their tags in a “list” as well as a “cloud” format, sort their tags alphabetically or by frequency, limit their searches by number of tags, and even create bundles (a way to arrange previously-used tags into subject groups). Some sites, like Flickr, have begun to define the scope of clouds more accurately: “Related tags” (tags specifically related to a particular search), “Hot tags in the past 24 hours,” “Hot tags over the past week,” “All time most popular tags,” etc. Finally, some sites, like LibraryThing, put the number of tags in parentheses besides the tag label: “J.K. Rowling (79,322).”

Tag clouds are moving in a positive direction. There is reason to be optimistic that, with careful implementation, they can be fashioned into tools for serious scholarly research. If so, we might actually welcome a cloudy forecast ahead!