What tools will you give them for
navigating their tags or the tags of others?
Tags are unlike other kinds of navigation. There??™s no up or down, no top
or bottom, and in many cases no categories or facets to anchor the information.
Navigating through tags is often a process of sifting rather than
moving deliberately to a specific destination.
In this chapter, we??™ll look at how you design navigation for the tag
space. We??™ll also examine ways of visualizing tags??”in particular, the tag
cloud??”to help people make sense of tag data.
Tag Clouds
By now you??™re familiar with tag clouds. You??™ve already seen a dozen or
more of them in this book.
With the growing popularity of tagging, tag clouds have become a fashionable
way of displaying tags. But like any fashion, what??™s hot today can look
??‹ ??‹ ??‹
Navigation and
Visualization
55
6 TAGGING: PEOPLE-POWERED METADATA FOR THE SOCIAL WEB
like an embarrassing fad tomorrow. In a popular and oft-quoted blog post last year, Web
designer Jeffrey Zeldman referred to them as the mullet of Web design.
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