We??™ll call this approach linear scaling, meaning that the differences
between the smallest and largest will be linear rather than exponential.
NAVIGATION AND VISUALIZATION : TAG CLOUDS
100 TAGGING: PEOPLE-POWERED METADATA FOR THE SOCIAL WEB
The math involved in linear scaling is slightly more complicated??”but not much.
Because virtually every programming language has a logarithm function, the extra programming
effort is just a few keystrokes.
Figure 5 .4 shows the tag cloud generated with linear scaling.
Figure 5.4 a tag cloud created using linear scaling.
So, which method should you use? Aesthetics are always subjective, but linear scaling
seems to produce a more attractive tag cloud that??™s easier to read. Another benefit, if
your tag cloud doubles as navigation, is that your tags will be generally larger and thus
easier to click. For example, you can see that tags such as ???business??? and ???comix??? are
much larger in Figure 5.4. (This is because linear scaling makes tags in the middle of
that distribution larger than proportional scaling.
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