Something has always bothered me about tag clouds. All my life I have listened to music from independent record labels, independent radio, sought out Avant Garde art, made it my mission to understand Baudrillard, Chomsky and McLuhan. Basically tried to think for myself. As a consequence, I have only ever taken on board recommendations when it is provided by those who have proven to me, their impeccable taste.


So tag clouds are a great idea but to me they only serve to highlight what is popular... to everyone. Their mechanism for highlighting content (enlarging the word which represents the topic) only creates more demand for attention and further propel the topic into further popularity. This, by natural logic pushes the more obscure topics (those which I might find more interesting) into further obscurity. It's the perfect democratic system; a process of design by community that fails miserably to provide an impartial coverage of content.


But the system has its place. And I like how the online world has accepted such a basic design device (typographic hierarchy) to mean a more elaborate navigational system. I like how it sucks people in to traversing a site laterally. I like how it allows users to create a navigatable Folksnomy. And I like how when tags are created by users of a site, it allows them to generate their own nomenclature which is meaningful to them.

Tim Kotsiakos, Creative Director

Labels: Design and Usability, Web Culture and Trends