Re: Thoughts about Web 2.0

Hal Shubin wrote:
> I have a client who wants to make a current project as Web 2.0 as possible

> Web 2.0 gives us more of the flexibility that we had pre-Web.

Yup.

I love the recent web 2.0 trends but I am concerned about
accessibility. In answering a question about accessibility
at last year's Carson Workshops, a panelist reckoned it'd
be a couple of years until accessibility techniques caught
up with web 2.0.

The web 2.0 rush reminds me of prior rushes into animated
GIFs, Flash and CSS. I think people go through a period
of getting carried away with all the cool things that can
be done and forget that maintainability, flexibility and
accessibility are still important.

> What do you think about having "Most popular <whatever>" categories?

I think they're an easy gimmick and must skew access to content.
If you're going to do anything like that, how about "Recent 10"?

> 3. Tags.
> Can tags (user-generated taxonomies) replace a pre-defined taxonomy?

No.

A mix of pre-defined taxonomy terms plus user-generated tags is
best. Using only a taxonomy will be restricting (and maintenance-heavy),
whilsy tagging is too slap-dash. When Bradley Horowitz talked up
Flickr's tagging at content 2.0 last year he used the "London" tag
to show how you could see photos of London. I resisted yelling out
"London, England or London, Ontario?"

> Maybe my problem isn't with the idea of tags, but just that we need some
> new ways to use them.

Tag clouds are just a way of visualising frequency data. I was
involved in discussing the requirements of an online research
archive, where academic papers already include keyword terms. I
suggested we could use tag clouds to show how researched trends
changed over time by using keyword frequency.

I just found this from Microsoft who do something similar:
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/tags/

Finally, I know I keep giving my own site as an example, but I
did use build it to experiment with interfaces. I added my own
controlled taxonomy to a shopping environment. People can use
it to browse or search the catalogue -  it's used a lot:. E.g.,
http://www.paolability.com/shop/jewellery/detail.lml?j=necklace85

> I haven't seen any multiple-term clouds yet

See http://www.pacificepoch.com/keywordmap.php for clusters
in tag clouds.

Delicious's 'bundle tags' interface has multiple-term tag clouds.

I Googled for - tag cloud multiple - and found these that
might be of interest:

  http://www.joelamantia.com/blog/archives/ideas/second_generation_tag_clouds.html
  http://www.joelamantia.com/blog/archives/ideas/tag_clouds_a_new_user_interface.html
  http://24ways.org/2006/marking-up-a-tag-cloud (address accessibility)


Paola
--
http://www.paolability.com/

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