Building a Better Tagcloud
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.
sketch 1: you seem to have alot of control over the secondary display, a perfect circle suggests you can arrange the text in a variety of ways. the next step might be to try another tagcloud in there. a cloud within a cloud! This could be represented as a mini treemap perhaps if you can create some grid elements. im pushing it i know.
sketch 2: There is something about displaying the tags in longer strings, or rows that makes them way more readable. When you take the scale element out of the visualization, they cease to become as pictographic as they are in sketch 1. It is not really a tagcloud anymore. This really makes me wonder about the use of scale and how it should be treated in the tagcloud.
Comment by draggin — February 26, 2006 @ 11:03 pm