Reading the Tag Cloud

I can remember lying on my back on a grassy Indiana hill, interpreting the clouds as they drifted by. Did that cumulus formation resemble a white elephant or a red herring? It didn’t matter. It was an exercise for my imagination. I still like clouds of all kinds, including the decidedly Web 2.0 creation: the Tag Cloud.

So what exactly is a tag cloud?
A tag cloud is a visual representation of a weighted list. It represents the frequency of occurance of tagged material on a website. According to Wikipedia, the first tag cloud appeared on another favorite website of mine, Flickr. At Flickr, each photo can be have one or more tags. You can even tag other people’s photos. And so, I might tag a photo of my mom at the Golden Gate bridge with sanfrancisco, goldengate and mom. Later, I can search through all of my photos, say for all photos tagged “sanfrancisco” and get a list. I can even search across all public photos in Flickr using the same tag.

The tag cloud provides a list of all the tags (or the most popular, or most recent), but rather than simply listing them, it clearly shows the popularity of a tag by increasing the text size. At a glance, you know exactly what tags are most popular, and get a sense for what matters most to that community. Aside from Flickr, you can now find tag clouds at a lot of Web 2.0-ish websites, including del.icio.us, Technorati, Last.fm and now here at www.jeffhester.net.

I’ve gone through my entries and tagged them, and what you see in the right column on the main page is the resulting tag cloud. What do you learn from my own tag cloud? The top tags are bigblueball (no surprise), flickr, music, humor and googlemaps. Those who know me well will likely see a few other telltale tags that reveal my personal bent.

On a community level, this tagging is referred to as folksonomy (as opposed to taxonomy). It’s classification by-and-for the people. Democratic tagging. Punk rock tagging. And very possibly useful tagging.

Folksonomy vs. Taxonomy
Developing knowledge management and communities of practice at Fluor has taught me a great deal about ontology, taxonomy and vocabulary — probably more than you’ll want to hear. But one thing is clear — the average employee doesn’t have the personal bandwidth to care a wit about an overdesigned tagging schema. What’s meaningful to the enterprise may have little or no relevance to an employee on a personal level.

Can folkonomy and tag clouds help? Clay Shirky, speaking at O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech conference earlier this year says ontology is overrated. Shirky pumps up folksonomy tags, but disregards the need for a flexible corporate ontology. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Folksonomy and taxonomy can co-exist, the latter serving the enterprise and the former the individual.

As for tag clouds, they are accessible and information-rich. How do they fare in the context an online community? Ph.D. student and researcher Danah Boyd shares some interesting observations on tag clouds. Much as my own tag cloud reveals something about my interests, a community’s tag cloud reflects the character of that community. Boyd sees a flaw — large “communities” such as Technorati may be too big and too diverse for the tag cloud to be truly meaningful. I see her point, though I’d argue that as large as Technorati is, it’s still narrowly targeted (techies and bloggers are still a niche).

As for me, I still love clouds. Add tag clouds to that list.