After talking about Web 2.0 technologies I just looked “Web 2.0” up and realized that there is a special form of user interaction that just strikes my eyes: Tag Clouds.
Tag Clouds allows to represent words that users had tagged on posts in a special way:
Often used words will be highlighted by a bigger and brighter color, automatically.
Administrator or publishers can not influence a tag cloud that represents user posts and their tags. The Tag Clouds allows new user to get an idea of the important topics of a website or a blog.
Although this is a very interesting technique of categorizing the content of a website, it is necessary that the used tags are relevant to its specific post. Not tagging or wrong tags would cause a not representative tag cloud. Using some conventions, like the use of only lowercase and only singular, and not that concrete words decreases duplicates and almost similar words in your Tag Cloud. This means that your Tag Cloud will be more meaningful.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/11/07/tag-clouds-gallery-examples-and-good-practices/
Thanks for the post Jassin. I noticed this graphic in my web surfing but didn't take the time to figure out what it was. This is a very interesting concept given blogs can get so big that knowing what the hot topics are would be very useful.
ReplyDeleteNice post Jassin. One thing I recall from a previous class where we used a blog was the usage of different spellings, case, and plural cases of a word. Even in this class, there are already tags 449W, IS449, and IS449W used. These tags all mean the same thing! I wonder what could be done to get rid of this and help make tag clouds more accurate. . .
ReplyDeleteI must admit, the Tag clouds are pretty eye catching and neat looking. They seem to be becomming quite popular too!
ReplyDelete