I’m not sure that all tagging problems are limited to visualization issues in current tag clouds. My opinion is that we lack that fundamental structure that has been lost reaching a flat set of keywords. Yes, this approach allowed that wild tagging adoption, but now it’s time to reintroduce a little of structure.

Anyway a few interesting posts are out about ways in which tag clouds could be visually improved to increase their value for users, conveying more and varied information.

Two important effects that hit tag clouds were introduced by Bokardo:

1. Popularity Decay
2. Emergent Tags

Popularity Decay

Popularity Decay is the process through which an already popular tag looses part of its popularity, letting new tags emerging in the tag cloud.

Here the problem is that the popularity decay cycle often takes to long to be completed. When a new meme emerges, the majority of users continue to tag that meme empowering more and more its adoption in a pandemic behaviour (a sort of tag tipping point has been reached here).
This behaviour hides the emergence of new memes to power users of the system, forcing them to see again and again those same old tags until new ones have bypassed a popularity threshold. Power users instead tend to be more interested by new, innovative and often more advanced concepts and strongly want to smell this memes at the very beginning of their spreading.

Let’s say: One size doesn’t fit all.

Quoting Bokardo:

One of the major problems with popularity is that popularity breeds popularity. When something gets popular enough, it is introduced to newer, wider audiences. These audiences, unaccustomed to the new idea, keep it popular. Unfortunately, these cycles tend to be too long: new things that become popular on a wide scale drown out those newer ideas that are still on the small scale, waiting their turn at the big time. These smaller ideas might be just as valuable as the popular ideas, they just haven’t had their chance to shine. Those folks who already know about the popular idea and are waiting for the new idea are out of luck.
……………….
The idea of popularity decay illustrates the tension between new ideas and popular ideas. Both are valuable, but not at the expense of the other.

Emergent Tags

Emergents Tags as Memetic Connection are a concept strongly connected to popularity decay.

Emergent tags are those tags that, in a specific moment in time, are acquiring relevance and popularity in the system (in a exponentially fast way).
Emergent tags are quite rare and valuable because popularity cycles are slow (humans tends to change their mind and their ideas slowly) and because emergent memes can be leveraged to better understand trends of change. Having an updated and complete vision of your customers desires and interests it’s a competitive advantage letting you quickly introduce valuable services and products.

New concepts actually emerge and evolve in every moment, but a few of them are able to make their way through the popularity barrier reaching the attention of the mass in a very short time period.
That’s because emergent tags are probably the reflection of a memetic connection: the speed at which memes moves along the power law curve from the tail to the sleepier section is proportional to our connectedness degree. Memetic connection is a virtuos circle because a high level of connectivity improves sharing, collaboration and communication between people. This kind of connectivity stimulates and simplify the creation of weak ties not based on a geographical proximity but on a community of interests. These weak ties, in turn, increase the people ability to stay connected and thus the memetic connection.

What’s in it for tag clouds evolution?

To solve the tag hell we need to let user grasping tagging trends and tags’ relationships.

Trends can be shown publishing not only the most popular tags in the entire system story but also the most popular in the last 24h, in the last week, etc as Flickr is already doing.

You can show emergent tags also using colors or letting users customize the look and feel of your tag cloud with its content.

Trying to generalize, what I see here is a real clear need: people need to access tags in a variety of different ways. This means that tags cannot be internally represented as a simple flat set, because to provide different access possibilities, the system needs a structure, a metadata structure for that set.

Here again, faceted tags could solve the issue. Emergent tags are a mix of two concepts:

• Freshness: the date in which the tag has been introduced in the system
• Popularity: how many people used that tags

Time and Popularity could be simply seen as two facets (yes I don’t know how to manage popularity between Ranganathan’s PMEST super facets, social rating wasn’t probably already existent at that time ).

So the fundamental points are:

1. We need the ability to see tag clouds from many different perspectives to satisfy the informational needs of our users. That perspective could be time, popularity, space, topic, author, etc.. It depends from: your domain (the content), your users (and their informational goals and tasks), your business goals
2. Avoid mixing structure and presentation: you could visualize faceted tags through slides, lists, icons, colors or using a matrix, but you need the structure first.
3. Provide context in tag clouds: the popularity of a tag is really important for users also to understand tags relative relavance. People cannot perceive a one pixel difference between two tags and adding the number of items tagged with a certain keywords could help a lot

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 at 12:07 pm and is filed under General Discussions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.