Whether you call them tag clouds, heat maps, or just eclectic ransom notes, I think visual presentations of content via oddly-sized labels are fun to look at. They may even be usable. But let’s not worry about that just yet.
Take a look at an experiment: a tag cloud for News.com. Instead of user-applied tags, these labels are tags applied by the editors, so the popularity of different labels is by the number of stories which earned the label — known as topics — in the last 30 days. There are more ideas for this. For example, I prefer this view. But what do you think? There’s a feedback link… fire away. Or email me at work: john dot roberts at c n e t dot com.
Kudos to A and K for their work on this. Real names withheld only because I didn’t ask them if they minded.
Note: if Zeldman wrote in April that “Tag clouds are the new mullets,” then what does it mean to throw one into the ring in June? Oh well… maybe fashion will come around again… that’s what Web 2.0 is all about, right? What’s old is new again… 2005 is just 1998 with broadband, after all. And that makes all the difference.
By the way, you did try typing in that search field, didn’t you?