Fading Waypoints

The IA summit starts tomorrow… this feels like the xmas eve when i was 8 or something. Too bad I was not able to attend any of the pre confernce workshops, but I’ll will be scouring the blogs looking for details on how that went.

Earlier this week, Phillip Jeffery hosted Scott Golder out at UBC and I was fortunate to be able to attend.  Its always cool to meet a few more people going in to a conference and get some of the discussions going early. Scotts presentation was great, and as he has done some of the only quantitative research on the use of del.icio.us, vitaly important. Somebody may have to pick up where he left off because as Phillip mentioned one of the questions that arose from the discussion was “why dont people “retag“? and as the scope of Scott’s study was only for a 72 hr. time span, it did not really provide any information that would shed some light on that. This question is central to the presentation we will be giving on monday, and in a nutshell i can say they don’t do it, cause they are no decent affordances for them to do so.  Of course it could also have to do with the other question that arose, “What type of person is drawn to tagging?” Anthony and I will be tackling the first question however, and not to let anything out of the bag early,  for us, its all about the tagcloud.

Scott Leslie, edublogger supreme, mentioned last week that Tagclouds should be be more group sepcific, an observation with which I couldn’t agree more.

One of the things that has always bugged me about broad tagclouds like the one on del.icio.us or flickr
is that, well, they are really broad - there is nothing connecting all
of the words appearing in the tagcloud other than that they were used
by any user of one of these services, and the userbases on
these services are totally heterogenous. So sure, I can see generally
what the popular tags for all flickr or del.icio.us users are, but why
should I care? What I do care about is what the tags used in my particular community are.

That said, he points to Gnosh a new service for clustering your own little bits of the weeb together, which seems to use as a primary interface device… a tagcloud.  nice. We’ll see how this beta service pans out, but I hope its more responsive than the orginal Tagcloud, which either has been brought to its knees by sheer demand, or is on hold pending subsumption by some, much larger fish. And I was sooo hoping to have the fading waypoints tagcloud active for our presentation on monday. Hmmph.

Not to be out done, Brian the headmaster of disaster, blogged about the code smithery of one of the geniuses he works with, who came up with a nifty gadget that embeds his own del.icio.us tagcloud right on his blog! This allows users to navigate Brians link collection without ever having to leave his site! Sweetness!  …uuuhh is there a sign up form or anything?, because I just have to get me some of that. Excellent work Enej!

The point of this post, and hopefully that we will be able to make clear as mud on monday is that the tagcloud is here to stay, and will be joining the ranks of traditional menu navigation and free text search as a standard means for users to interact with information on a site.

An excellent discussion emerged on rashmi’s blog about the website 83 degrees, and its use of a tagcloud for general navigation .

Overall the respondants feel its a bit too unreliable for serious usability, but has some potential to augment the more structured flow of a web site. The designer of the site reveals his reasons for implenenting it in the first place.

I am gererally not a fan of tag clouds at all because they quickly become too cluttered. In this case it was done as a design/marketing effort and not at all for UI. It turns out there are very few options for our corporate site, so it is relatively uncluttered and encourages discovery.

Found two more links from the respondants as well…

googlecloud - has apparently been released recently, quite disturbing.

and what promises to be an amazing post from joe speculating on how tag clouds may evolve. I haven’t even had time to read this yet, but if this is any indication I already looking forward to part two.

In part two, titled “Second Generation Clouds”, I’ll share some thoughts on likely ways that the second generation of tag clouds will evolve in structure and usage in the near future, based on how they support a chain of understanding that semantically links taggers and tag cloud consumers. Context is the key for tag cloud consumers, and we’ll see how it affects the likely evolution of the tag cloud as a visualization tool.

Your post on colour tagging got me to thinking about labels in the Mac OS. For as long as I can remember (well at least system 7), Apple has provided the user with the ability to apply a coloured label to any file on the system.

By default, the labels are the colour names, but his can easily be changed in the finder preferences:

Once you set up your labels, it is a simple matter of applying it to a document through a contextual menu:

As you can see, the colour appears directly on the view of the file in the finder:

You can also use the colour/label as a search criteria:

Some limitations:

While I wouldn’t call labels a rich form of tagging, it does offer rudimentary tagging to your file system.

Two more sketches, both attempts to combine the typical cloud and the associated tags into a single cloud element. The relationship is determined by the number of resources each tag share together, compared to the number of neighbours that tag has has over all resources.

Sketch 1:

The default view is a normal cloud, but as you rollover each tag, the associated tags appear around the tag in a sphere. the biggest issue with this (beyond the messy CSS) is tags with many associations start getting cramped for room, especially at the top and bottom of the sphere. I could set it up with a dynamic radius, so tags with more associations had larger radius, but that could get out of hand, and start drawing off screen, which I definitely want to avoid.

Sketch 2:

Same initial state as #1, but in this instance, the associated tags get a background and colour. I am also trying to suggest the strength of a the relationship between the tags by modifying the tags brightness. The brighter the colour, the more closely related the tags are. It’s pretty subtle at the moment, but it’s not too bad.

I should point out that I have only tested these I FireFox; I’m not looking to publish these formally, and am not interested in testing and debugging in other browsers at the moment. So if these don’t work, do yourself a favour and get FireFox already.

Took another stab at the cloud of related tags with some additional CSS  used to modify the position of the tags.
Now the releated tags form a circle around the main tag.

Not all that interesting yet, but im treating these as preliminary sketches and proofs of concept.