One of the less controversial ‘good things’ about Web 2.0 is the tag cloud. There’s one on the top-right of this page. In years gone by, that would have been a list of the categories covered on this site. So why is the cloud better than a list? Two things occur to me:
(a) The compactness means it has an immediate visual impact. You can get a good sense in one glance of what this blog is about and whether or not you might want to follow it. While that cloud happens to be in alphabetical order, arguably size order would do an even better job.
(b) It’s a tool as well as a picture. Each of those words leads to a series of articles. Maybe you came here looking for articles about business. You can see I sometimes write on that subject at a glance and with a single click you can bring up all of them. (That is the reason I choose alphabetical order, by the way: so readers can look up topics more easily).
They’ve become ‘part of the furniture’ of Web 2.0 sites, perhaps, appreciated but not really considered. So I was interested to see the topic re-emerge this week on the O’Reilly Radar blog. Andrew Odewahn, director of the O’Reilly network had applied a tag cloud filter to Tim O’Reilly’s ‘What is Web 2.0‘ essay. He ended up with this:
And you can see one definition in a moment’s glance – a pretty reasonable one at that – of Web 2.0. It’s web software applications and services that deal with the links between data and users. You don’t even have to read the essay to get a good idea of the O’Reilly’s point of view of what is important in this sphere.
On the other hand, though, there are some big holes in this picture. It doesn’t mention anything about ‘collective intelligence’ or the ‘wisdom of crowds’, both of which are pretty central to the web 2.0 idea and the essay. Why? Because they are phrases and computers aren’t very good at dealing with language beyond single words. To a computer ‘collective intelligence’ is just two words; the ‘wisdom of crowds’ is three. It’s picked up the word ‘collective’ but it’s in small type. The algorithms used to generate clouds might be tweaked or primed by an intelligent operator to provide a ’seed list’ of terms, but making the creation of clouds automatic – so it can recognise key phrases without help – remains a bit of a holy grail.
So going forward, a few interesting alternatives have emerged through the comments. Mark Woodman is working on a ‘tag constellation‘ that analyses the top one hundred blogs to come up with a cloud representing the current ‘buzz’ across the blogs. This was about a story concerning Fujitsu making a very big hard drive. It’s also very interactive so clicking on the orbiting words would lead to other, connected stories.
Moritz Stefaner is working on another alternative. The colour intensity complements the words to show the extent of the buzz around particular topics. The cloud retains intelligence about what words relate to which topics, but fades them in and out according to whether or not they are hot right now:
Ted Shelton at Personal Bee is working on phrase analysis. Their site is a news aggregator and so identifying hot news stories depends on the recognition of phrases. ‘Big’ shouldn’t be recognised, but add ‘Brother’ and it’s probably part of a story. Add ‘racism row’ and you definitely know it is. Here’s a part of their view of the buzz around the topic of Web 2.0 today:
Of these three alternatives, it’s impossible to say that one is on the right track or that others are wrong. That will depend on the specific application they’re being used for, and the tastes of users. Different demographics will probably like one model more than another. Two things though, I think are absolutely vital for the next generation of any of these news tracker applications:
- Phrase recognition – This can probably happen automatically through language analysis for established stories, but may need to be done by hand for now for breaking news.
- More dimensions – we already have size, but currency and authority could really improve the ability to navigate such clouds.
Don’t know if you have seen the Quintura search application? It creates a mind map around search terms, letting users delve in and refine their topics on the fly. Sadly, it can’t do phrases and its language analysis doesn’t always work well. However, a new, improved Quintura for today’s blog posts from the people I read and the people that they’ve linked to is what I really want.
Technorati: folksonomy, tags, Web 2.0, website
Ian, please check Quintura for Kids at http://kids.quintura.com You can see phrases in a kid-related tag cloud out there. Re: visualizing blog links – it’s an interesting idea! We are going to have an affiliate program – you will be able to create an interactive Quintura tag cloud for a navigation through your blog and for web search.
I’ve seen Kids Quintura, Yakov, and I think it’s great. The only reason it wasn’t mentioned in this post is that I wouldn’t have had anything more to say about it than vanilla Quintura.
Good news about the affiliate program – I’d love a more interactive visualisation tool here.
Thanks for the research on this subject!
I don’t know where and why the concept began (hence the word) but I can see that a on a site a Web 2. tag cloud, in many ways, looks like a cloud in the sky, but in fact infers something more. If the objects in the tag cloud pertain to subject matters and that a larger one means that that subject matter is more popular than a other objects, it simulates in many ways a real cloud in the sky in that the cloud has darker and lighter matter inside (it’s funny there are no clouds in the sky as I am writing. I wanted one so that I could use it as my example!).
Your point is that the concept as it is used right now is limited simply because computers and software are still not “intelligent” machines where meaning can be better represented. Your question is how is that can be accomplished.
What I like about Web 2.0 is that we are asking questions like this as it applies to our applications. In contrast, questions like these were begin asked about computers during birth of computers.
Great comment, Bob. Tag clouds are a metaphor and just as we can see more ‘weight’ in some real-life clouds than others thanks to their colour, colouration in Web 2.0 tag clouds – the next step, I think – is a natural extension, not a paradigm jump.
Ian,
Great discussion. I’ve never been a tag cloud fan per se, but I’m convinced there is a Threshold of the Obvious that somebody will break through on this sooner than later. (At which point we’ll all facepalm and say, “why didn’t I think of that?”)
In the meantime, if anybody has suggestions for the Tag Constellation, I’m all ears. My goal is to have something intuitive and DHTML-based, rather than require Flash. That may prove too limiting, but only time will tell.
A more interesting constellation view can be found on Jan 9, right around when the iPhone was announced:
http://labs.techbrew.net/jetstream/constellation.php?date=2007-01-09
Regards,
Mark
Hi,
thanks for bringing this up and linking to my experiment! I posted an update and some of my thoughts on the topic at http://well-formed-data.net/archives/42/tag-maps-update
An version of my “elastic tag maps” animated over time can be found at: http://well-formed-data.net/archives/38/emerging-topics
(It would be great if you could replace the screenshot with one of the more recent pictures from my post.)
[...] Tag Cloud 2.0 | twopointouch: web 2.0, blogs and social media Great article from Ian Delaney on tagging (folksonomies) and their prevalence in all things 2.0 (tags: tagging tags folksonomy folksonomies web2.0 enterprise2.0) [...]
Man, I love me some tag clouds. As an amateur student of memetics, they allow a graphical representation of the unique and organic memetic environment that as of yet has gone unseen. I’m interested in trying to produce some kind of work as to how tag clouds can be used to represent the growth and demise of an idea or concept in real time – if you know of any resources that might be of assistance in that noble quest, totally hook a brother up, yo.
[...] actually a big fan of tag-clouds – as I’ve mentioned before. I think they encourage exploration, individual journeys and also give an instantly understood [...]