Re: Usability of Tag Clouds

And this:
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/pfps/temp/web/www2007.org/posters/poster988.pdf

ABSTRACT
With the growth of social bookmarking a new approach for metadata creation
called tagging has emerged. In this paper we
evaluate the use of tag presentation techniques. The main goal of our
evaluation is to investigate the effect of some of the different
properties that can be utilized in presenting tags e.g. alphabetization,
using larger fonts etc. We show that a number of
these factors can affect the ease with which users can find tags and use the
tools for presenting tags to users.




On 5/24/07, oliver green <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> Try this:
>
> Rivadeneira, A. W., Gruen, D. M., Muller, M. J., and Millen, D. R. 2007.
> Getting our head in the clouds: toward evaluation studies of tagclouds. In
> *Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
> Systems* (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 - May 03, 2007). CHI '07.
> ACM Press, New York, NY, 995-998. DOI=
> http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240775
>
> ABSTRACT
>
> Tagclouds are visual presentations of a set of words, typically a set of
> "tags" selected by some rationale, in which attributes of the text such as
> size, weight, or color are used to represent features, such as frequency, of
> the associated terms. This note describes two studies to evaluate the
> effectiveness of differently constructed tagclouds for the various tasks
> they can be used to support, including searching, browsing, impression
> formation and recognition. Based on these studies, we propose a paradigm for
> evaluating tagclouds and ultimately guidelines for tagcloud construction.
>
>
>
>
>
> On 5/24/07, Bryan Grubaugh <[email protected] > wrote:
> >
> > I have no practical experience with cloud tags in a professional
> > setting, but have noticed several observations from seeing them in use
> > across the web.
> >
> > 1)  They are a very trendy item.  I once saw them described as "the
> > mullets of web 2.0.  Some people just can't resist mullets" (I believe
> > Jeffrey Zeldman said this).  They serve no practical function that
> > probably couldn't be better represented in another fashion.  This being
> > said, I might fall victim to the "I don't know, what I don't know."
> > problem, and I'm just waiting to learn something they are extremely
> > useful for.
> >
> > 2)  They should not be used to show relevance, only relativity.  What I
> > mean is, if you are going to use a tag cloud, it should only be used to
> > show some thing's size, popularity, or importance against other items in
> >
> > the same set.  They should not be used to show results, as the nature of
> > a tag cloud is to provide weight (often confused with importance)
> > against other items.  When a person sees the tag cloud, their attention
> > is immediately drawn to the larger items.  The smaller items, are often
> > overlooked, as seems to be the OPs problem.
> >
> >
> > Those are just my thoughts.  I've personally never been too thrilled
> > with the trendy things that web 2.0 has come up with, so I might be
> > slightly biased against them.
> >
> >
> > -Bryan
> >
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