Alternatives to Tag Clouds?

Jeffrey Zeldman is a well known lecturer and author on web design according to his entry in the wikipedia. He has maintained a blog, Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report, on the topic since 1995. In April he ran a post, Tag clouds are the new mullets, semi-trashing tag clouds as being over done. So I wondered what his thoughts were on alternatives. I went to put in a comment to this post asking the question and noticed that he apparently does not take comments, at least on older posts. I did see that there are lots of comments on his most recent posts but the tag cloud one does not list comments or have a way to add them.

Anyway, I remain very interested in the concept of tag clouds. Typepad provides this option for category listing and I used it for a while. I then dropped the on my blog as I found the regular listing easier to read and it seemed redundant to have two categories archives, especially since I experiment with so much other stuff in my side bars. However, I many of my blog clients like tag clouds and I think it works for them. I may add mine back.

So I am interested in starting a conversation and will keep this comment field open to all legitimate comments. What do you think about tag clouds? Equally important, what do you see as alternatives to tag clouds?

Comments

[Bob Lancaster]

I’m a big fan of tags in general and find them very helpful. Del.icio.us does a great job of tag management offering a variety of ways to use and access tags. I use tags primarily to find information on a particular topic and rarely use them based on their popularity.

So I see tag clouds being useful for people who are looking for what’s popular but I would prefer to type my subject/tag into a field and see if I get any hits.

[Bill Ives]

Bob

Thanks for your comment and I agree with your persepective. It seems that tag clouds are good for the (human) browsers and search fields for these who know what they want. I think they are complementary. Bill

[Doug Cornelius]

Bill -

I do not think tag clouds should be used for navigation. They are useful to add information to tags and to provide some insight into what a site is all about.

If you have a list of categories on a blog, I think a flat list more useful than a cloud to highlight those categories.

The tag cloud is useful in an about section to help give an overview of the topics in the blog.

The massive scale of tags in Flickr requires a tag cloud to help highlight content. Humble bloggers like us do not have those massive amounts of data that need massive amounts of metadata to highlight and find content.

I use tag clouds in presentations to set a backdrop about me. See the second slide: http://www.slideshare.net/dougcornelius/knowledge-management-and-web-20-526007

[Bill Ives]

Doug - Thanks. I use a flat category list on my blog for the reason you mention. I really like your slide. How did you generate that cloud with tags in different directions. Does the placement, as well as the size, matter? Bill

[Mike Gil]

Hi Bill -- It looks like Doug used Wordle to create the tag cloud you see in the slide: http://www.wordle.net. It's a very interesting toy/tool!

I favor the tag cloud on my blog to complement (not replace) a time-based TOC. These devices, along with a summary of the last "n" posts, provide users with several different ways to dive into information of interest to them.

[Bill Ives]

Mike - Thanks for your comment. You made a very important point. It is useful to offer a variety of ways to find the stuff that falls off the front page of a blog. Too often this content gets lost except perhaps through search engines. Perhaps i will fire up my tag cloud again, if not for no no other reason than my own insight on the relative weight of stuff. Bill