update 04/11/06: there seemed to be a problem with the survey closing too soon, it is now open till the end of april. thanks.

Our presentation was last monday, and all went fairly according to plan. Anthony and myself were pleased with the turnout and response, even though the room was ENORMOUS, as my pictures on flickr will attest to. I was glad we did the last minute hack and slash of the talk as we timed just right for people to get out of there for lunch.

The take away of our presentation was an invitation to our audience to participate in some initial data gathering in the form of a survey. Since our audience now extends onto the web, if you are at all interested in tagging, you too are welcome to complete the following survey, wether you were at the IAsummit or not.

It is a short survey, (approximately 5 min) and there are no mandatory questions, fill in the info you would like to. We will be keeping the survey open for the next couple weeks or so, until at least I can email all the new people I met. When completed the results will be posted here as well. Thanks in advance for your participation!

>>>This way to Our Survey

Technorati Tags: iasummit iasummit2006 survey tagging tagging survey Tags

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.

Technorati Tags: gnosh iasummit iasummit2006 tagcloud tagging

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.

Technorati Tags: tagcloud interface tagcloud navigation

These were some concepts we wanted to see in a mock up. Currently I am thinking of other ways icons could be more utilized in tagging user interfaces.

Phillip J. got me thinking, about the idea of what he calls egotagging during our discussion at northern voice earlier this month. The idea that if you bookmark something first, you should get some kind of reward as feedback and that should be represented in the interface is an interesting one, although most likely benficial to power users only. A user could build a strong reputation as a “pro boomarker” thereby adding more value/weight to the resources she tags.
In general, I think the del.icio.us UI could employ a tad more color and interaction, (and icons!) but I believe in the concept of slow evolution as well. These mockups show an idea for the “first tag” feedback and introduces the idea of tagging with a diamond (the equivalent of googles’ stars). I think these would also be a FAST and easy way to copy other users’ links into your own collection. (just diamond it!)

‘First Tag‘ and ‘Diamond This‘ input interface

‘First Tag‘ and ‘Diamond This‘ feedback interface

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This was an early thought on introducing color as a tagging element. Using color maps to visualize a tag collection has endless possibilities, but at the very least you could browse your collection by the “dark blueish” color . The feedback UI does not mean anthing too specific, just that each resource would be assigned a color label and it’s proximity to others would be further defined by its position in the color map. The draw back is that it would not allow you to specify two tags with the exact same color.

‘Color Tag‘ input interface

‘Color Tag‘ input interface

Technorati Tags: color tag first mark icons in tagging tag rank Tagging UI Tagging user interface

Recently, Anthony and I have discussed using the tagcloud for an input interface, as opposed to merely a feedback mechanism that visualizes a collection of resources. Could tag clouds become the common UI for browsing large collections of data as well as organizing and sorting them? A few links that continue this thought.

The Power of Words - A Text Analysis of Political Discourse During Times of Crisis. via info aesthetics Uses a tag cloud to display frequency of words in poltical rhetoric, and goes the additional step of color coding specific words.

More and more I believe, digital assets will be indexed down to finer grains of detail, and users will have the ability to apply different kinds of search methods based on their needs. This collection of Common words in Tom Waits Songs, is an interesting example of an audio collection that has scanned song lyrics and sorts the data on frequency of use. There was alot of work that went into providing this resource, something that only a true fan would do. But its easy to imagine how this data could be available and automated for any musical collection. damn interesting.

Its seems that the trend of tagclouds are going to play an increasing role in HCI in general, not just for all these fancy dancing web 2.0 apps popping up all over the place.
Luke states

Search Folders, Smart Playlists, Virtual Folders, and Tags all group objects based on shared metadata and dynamically update their contents for efficient information retrieval through common attributes

Could they become more ubiquitous than lists to display information? Not given the current state of rendering them thats for sure. There is really going to have to be an evolution for tagclouds as interfaces to become truely useful. Hopefully we can contribute to this discussion.

Mario gives a thumbs up to vista for implenting tagging in the upcoming version of the vista OS. (and not much else). Hopefully josh can wait for it.

So far, all I can give Microsoft credit for (from what I’ve seen) is implementing tagging for their file system. Nice move. Easy transition to non-hierarchical file systems.

This was demonstrated at NorthernVoice earlier this month, and although they showed how all docs, media files, apps or whatever will be ‘taggable’, we did not see theUI that will be used to scan “My Computer” from a tagsonomy perspective. I wouldn’t mind having a crack at that myself.

Technorati Tags: power of words tagcloud taggin as interface tom waits

Design Theory	Tag Clouds User Interface
The elements of design are the basic building blocks or toolkit of the visual 2d artist. This is a list of the most common elements as they are understood in the field.	We are thinking of tagclouds in terms of there overall relationship to the elements and principles of design. Some of the elements are used in tagcloud display while others are not. Are there opportunities to explore other graphical techniques in the display of ‘tagged data‘? The following are brief summaries of how a particular design element is signifigant from tag cloud Ui perspective, and a visual representation of it.
Form (shape, line, dot, outline, contour) - Lines have many qualities in themselves such as direction, weight, and position. They are the basic elements needed to create shapes or forms, that occupy the space in a composition.	Letters are a distinct type of form from an artists perspective. Quite often creative types will want to reduce the font size on a web page as much as possible treating it as a textural element. Other times it is exaggerated and distorted as the designer explores line, shape and the letterforms themselves. In tag clouds, the overall letterform, is not considered in the presentation of the data and there seems no reason that it should. If anything the font face and style would be the variables to tweak.
Color (hue, intensity, saturation) - has tremendous expressive qualities and pyschological implications. Hue refers to the pure spectrum colors commonly referred to by the names - red, orange, yellow, blue, green violet.	Color has been used in insignifigant ways to date, for example with the third party service tagcloud’s blue and orange pallette. From initial observations, the different colors are simply meant to reinforce the changes in font-size or scale. No additional information is provided by the use of color, yet in a compostion it can be one of the more evocative elements.
Value (tone, light and dark) - is needed to create the illusion of 3d form and volume in a composition. The amount of light or dark affects color. Value can exist when color cannot and will contribute to creating the illusion of 3d space.	In the case of tagclouds, Value would probably have similar applications as color. adjusting the lightness will emphasize or decrease contrast, thereby positioning the element on hieararchy of visual attention..
Texture (pattern) - the surface quality of elements. The repitition of pattern creates texture and adds interest to a composition.	The tagcloud itself becomes a pattern that has much more distinguishability than a list or paragraph. Important words stand out because of the emphasis of scale and/or color. Through overlapping and variation of Value, the texture can become more abstract. This will allow more information to be displayed, but has negative effects on legibility.
Space (actual and virtual, positive and negative) - Taking into account the borders or frame of a composition, how the space is divided, organized, into the various parts Time (first, second, last…) - sequencing of elements. The central element in what makes animation work, from a series of images shown in sequence.	Tagclouds can only occupy a certain amount of the overall screen real estate. We must consider the placement of the tagcloud in the UI, the context of how they are displayed and if they are on their own page. Special tag groupings are often displayed seperately highlighing their importance to users. The temporal aspect of a tag cloud is one of the aspects that gives it usefulness. It represents the state of the resource collection "right now".
Sources - wikipedia, art design and visual thinking,Composition and Design Elements, Principles, and Visual Effects ,Design Exploring the Elements & Principles

Technorati Tags: design elements tagcloud

a little bit of humour for the tagosphere.

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We’ve been tagged. This looks like it is going to be a blast. =)

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via Headshift. Alistair Davidson proposed a standardised syntax for multi-tag queries
in Web 2.0 applications, as an essential step towards the Semantic Web.

Have to get this stuff down as it comes out. There is a new category,  Rules, that will list examples of solutions and sites developers are coming up with to add structure and/or meaning to the process of tagging. Alot of smart people are innovating with tags these days and even keeping up with the state of the art will prove challenging  For instance I have not even tried the tag
“unions” that Del.icio.us supports via the + operator yet.

Alistair calls tags “free-text Post-Its“, I love it. He notes the growing issues for programmers using the tag java (poor guys), and how its meaning is diluted depending on the context of the resource being tagged.  del.icio.us, technorati, flickr
What he comes up with is far more technically focussed than ur direction. But I tik these are some important rules to take into account. The machines rules. How often are all the advanced search operators used on google?

What is needed, therefore, is a generalised boolean syntax for tag URLs. A Tag Query Language, if you like. It must have certain properties :

Properties

1. It should be able to be used in a URL - so no “/” characters, no “.” characters, etc.
2. It should be human-interpretable - a person should be able to look at a TQL query string and work out what was intended without too much effort.
3. It should be simple - Web 2.0 is showing us that the simple solution is usually the best, and something which requires too much time to implement is just not going to be widely adopted.
4. It should be easily translatable into standard SQL
5. It must not expose the implementing website to potential SQL Injection attacks

headshift

Technorati Tags: headshift syntax tag syntax tagging

Working right up to the crunch, Anthony and I submitted the final version of our paper to the conference proceedings. It is also now posted on this website for anyone wanting a preview. We chose to pull back a bit on the scope as we were not sure where the planned workshops are going to take us. I am happy we covered what we did though. It gives some direction to our study without committing too much.

As this was coming together, it was amazing to realize just how fast the topic of tagging is moving. No sooner had the paper been submitted, and this post from robin good comes across my rss reader. Titled Folksonomies: Tags Strengths, Weaknesses And How To Make Them Work, Robin goes down a similar path, reviewing whats working, whats not and bringing forward some clever ideas to improve outcomes for users. This is an excellent companion to our work filling in many pieces we missed. A valuable asset for us.

One of the many good ideas that stand out…

Tagging could be improved by providing users with a set of helpful heuristics that promote good tag selection, such as a checklist of questions that could be applied to the object being tagged, in order to direct the tagger to various salient characteristics.

I still have to absorb the full impact of this post, but it is good to know that there is a need out there for further research on this stuff, and I hope we can offer some useful contributions to that end.

Technorati Tags: folksonomies iasummit