Fading Waypoints

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.