Joe Lamantia.com

Zeld­man jok­ingly called tag clouds “the new mul­lets” last year. At the time, I think he was taken a bit by sur­prise by the rapid spread of the tag cloud (as many peo­ple were). A big year later, it looks like this ver­sion of the world’s favorite dou­ble duty hair­cut will stay in fash­ion for a while. Zeld­man was dis­cussing the first gen­er­a­tion of tag clouds. I have some ideas on what the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion of tag clouds may look like that will con­clude this series of two essays. These two pieces com­bine ideas brew­ing since the tag­ging break­out began in earnest this time last year, with some pre­dic­tions based on recent exam­ples of tag clouds in prac­tice.
Update: Part two of this essay, Sec­ond Gen­er­a­tion Tag Clouds, is avail­able.
This first post lays ground­work for pre­dic­tions about the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion of tag clouds by look­ing at what’s behind a tag cloud. I’ll look at first gen­er­a­tion tag clouds in terms of their reliance on a “chain of under­stand­ing” that seman­ti­cally links groups of peo­ple tag­ging and con­sum­ing tags, and thus under­lies tag­ging and social meta­data efforts in gen­eral. I’ll begin with struc­ture of first gen­er­a­tion tag clouds, and move quickly to the very impor­tant way that tag clouds serve as visu­al­iza­tions of seman­tic fields.
Anatomy of a Tag Cloud
Let’s begin with the famil­iar first gen­er­a­tion tag cloud. Tag clouds (here we’re talk­ing about the user expe­ri­ence, and not the pro­gram­matic aspects) com­monly con­sist of two ele­ments: a col­lec­tion of linked tags shown in vary­ing fonts and col­ors to indi­cate fre­quency of use or impor­tance, and a title to indi­cate the con­text of the col­lec­tion of tags. Flickr’s tags page is the iconic exam­ple of the first gen­er­a­tion tag cloud. Screen shots of sev­eral other well known tag cloud imple­men­ta­tions show this pat­tern hold­ing steady in first gen­er­a­tion tag­ging imple­men­ta­tions such as del.icio.us and tech­no­rati, and in newer efforts such as last.fm and ma.gnolia.
Wikipedia’s entry for tag cloud is quite sim­i­lar, read­ing, “A tag cloud (more tra­di­tion­ally known as a weighted list in the field of visual design) is a visual depic­tion of con­tent tags used on a web­site. Often, more fre­quently used tags are depicted in a larger font or oth­er­wise empha­sized, while the dis­played order is gen­er­ally alpha­bet­i­cal… Select­ing a sin­gle tag within a tag cloud will gen­er­ally lead to a col­lec­tion of items that are asso­ci­ated with that tag.“
In terms of infor­ma­tion ele­ments and struc­ture, first gen­er­a­tion tag clouds are low com­plex­ity. Fig­ure 1 shows a schematic view of a first gen­er­a­tion tag cloud. Fig­ures 2 through 5 are screen­shots of well-known first gen­er­a­tion tag clouds.
Fig­ure 1: Tag Cloud Struc­ture

Fig­ure 2: last.fm

Fig­ure 3: tech­no­rati

Fig­ure 4: del.icio.us

Fig­ure 5: Ma.gnolia

Tag Clouds: Visu­al­iza­tions of Seman­tic Fields
The sim­ple struc­ture of first gen­er­a­tion tag clouds allows them to per­form a very valu­able func­tion with­out undue com­plex­ity. That func­tion is to visu­al­ize seman­tic fields or land­scapes that are them­selves part of a chain of under­stand­ing link­ing tag­gers and tag con­sumers. This is a good moment to describe the “chain of under­stand­ing”. The “chain of under­stand­ing” is an approach I use to help iden­tify and under­stand all the dif­fer­ent kinds of peo­ple and mean­ing, and the trans­for­ma­tions and steps involved in pass­ing that mean­ing on, that must work and con­nect prop­erly in order for some­thing to hap­pen, or an end state to occur. The chain of under­stand­ing is my own vari­a­tion / com­bi­na­tion of com­mon cog­ni­tive and infor­ma­tion flow map­ping using a sce­nario style for­mat. I’ve found the term res­onates well with clients and other audi­ences out­side the realm of IA.
How does the chain of under­stand­ing relate to tag clouds? The tags in tag clouds orig­i­nate directly from the per­spec­tive and under­stand­ing of the peo­ple tag­ging, but undergo changes while becom­ing a tag cloud. (For related read­ing, see Rashmi Sinha’s A social analy­sis of tag­ging which exam­ines some of the social mech­a­nisms under­ly­ing the activ­ity of tag­ging.) Tag clouds accrete over time when one per­son or a group of peo­ple asso­ciate a set of terms with a focus of some sort; a photo on flickr, a URL / link in the case of del.icio.us, an album or song for last.fm. As this list shows, a focus can be any­thing that can carry mean­ing or under­stand­ing. The terms or tags serve as car­ri­ers and ref­er­ences for the con­cepts each tag­ger asso­ciates with the focus. Con­cepts can include ideas of about­ness, ori­gin, or pur­pose, descrip­tive labels, etc. While the con­cepts may change, the focus remains sta­ble. What’s key is that the tag is a ref­er­ence and con­nec­tion to the con­cept the tag­ger had in mind. This con­nec­tion requires an ini­tial under­stand­ing of the focus itself (per­haps incor­rect, but still some sort of under­stand­ing), and the con­cepts that the tag­ger may or may not choose to asso­ciate with the focus. And this is the first step in the chain of under­stand­ing behind tag clouds, as shown in Fig­ure 6.
Fig­ure 6: Ori­gin: Focus and Con­cepts

As a result, tag clouds are more than col­lec­tion of descrip­tive or admin­is­tra­tive terms attached to a link, or other sort of focus. The tag is a sort of label that ref­er­ences a con­cept or set of con­cepts. A cloud of tags is then a col­lec­tion of labels refer­ring to a clus­ter of aggre­gated con­cepts. The com­bi­na­tion of tags that refer to con­cepts, with the orig­i­nal focus, cre­ates a ‘seman­tic field’. A seman­tic field is the set of con­cepts con­nected to a focus, but in a form that is now inde­pen­dent of the orig­i­nat­ing tag­gers, and avail­able to other peo­ple for under­stand­ing. In this sense, a seman­tic field serves as a form of rei­fied under­stand­ing that the tag­gers them­selves — as well as oth­ers out­side the group that cre­ated the seman­tic field — can now under­stand, act on, etc. (This speaks to the idea that infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture is a dis­ci­pline strongly aimed at reifi­ca­tion, but that’s a dif­fer­ent dis­cus­sion…). Fig­ure 7 shows this sec­ond step in the chain of under­stand­ing; with­out it, there is no seman­tic field, and no tag cloud can form. And now because this post is writ­ten from the view­point of prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions for tag cloud evo­lu­tion, I’m going to hold the def­i­n­i­tion and dis­cus­sion of a seman­tic field and focus, before I wan­der off track into semi­otics, lin­guis­tics, or other ter­ri­to­ries. The most impor­tant thing to under­stand is that *tag clouds com­prise visu­al­iza­tions of a seman­tic field*, as we’ve seen from the chain of under­stand­ing.
Fig­ure 7: Seman­tic Field

I believe tag clouds are rev­o­lu­tion­ary in their abil­ity to trans­late the con­cepts asso­ci­ated with nearly any­thing you can think of into a col­lec­tively vis­i­ble and action­able infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment, an envi­ron­ment that car­ries con­sid­er­able evi­dence of the orig­i­nal under­stand­ings that pre­cede and inform it. In a prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture sense, tag clouds can make meta­data — one of the more dif­fi­cult and abstract of the fun­da­men­tal con­cepts of the dig­i­tal uni­verse for the prover­bial per­son on the street — vis­i­ble in an eas­ily under­stood fash­ion. The genius of tag clouds is to make seman­tic con­cepts, the frames of under­stand­ing behind those con­cepts, and their man­i­fes­ta­tion as applied meta­data tan­gi­ble for many, many peo­ple.
Fig­ure 8: Seman­tic Field As Tag Cloud

With this notion of a tag cloud as a visu­al­iza­tion of a seman­tic field in mind, let’s look again at an exam­ple of a tag cloud in prac­tice. The flickr style tag cloud (what I call a first gen­er­a­tion tag cloud) is in fact a visu­al­iza­tion of many tag sep­a­rate clouds aggre­gated together. Seman­ti­cally then, the flickr tag cloud is the visu­al­iza­tion of the cumu­la­tive seman­tic field accreted around many dif­fer­ent focuses, by many peo­ple. In this usage, the flickr tag cloud func­tions as a visu­al­iza­tion of a seman­tic land­scape built up from all asso­ci­ated con­cepts cho­sen from the com­bined per­spec­tives of many sep­a­rate tag­gers.
To sum­ma­rize, cre­at­ing a tag cloud requires com­ple­tion of the first three steps of the chain of under­stand­ing that sup­ports social meta­data. Those steps are:
1. Under­stand­ing a focus and the con­cepts that could apply that focus
2. Accu­mu­lat­ing and cap­tur­ing a seman­tic field around the focus
3. Visu­al­iz­ing the seman­tic field as a tag cloud via trans­for­ma­tion
The fourth step in this chain involves users’ attempts to under­stand the tag cloud. For this we must intro­duce the idea of con­text, which addresses the ques­tion of which orig­i­nal per­spec­tives under­lie the seman­tic field visu­al­ized in a tag cloud, and how those con­cepts have changed before or dur­ing pre­sen­ta­tion.
How Cloud Con­sumers Under­stand Tag Clouds
Users need to put a given tag cloud in proper con­text in order to under­stand the cloud effec­tively. Their end may goals may be find­ing related items, sur­vey­ing the think­ing within a knowl­edge domain, iden­ti­fy­ing and con­tact­ing col­lab­o­ra­tors, or some other pur­pose, but it’s essen­tial for them to under­stand the tags in the cloud to achieve those goals. Thus when­ever a user encoun­ters a tag cloud, they ask and answer a series of ques­tions intended to estab­lish the cloud’s con­text and fur­ther their under­stand­ing. Con­text related ques­tions often include “Where did these tags come from? Who applied them? Why did they choose these tags, and not oth­ers? What time span does this tag cloud cover?” Con­text in this case means know­ing enough about the con­di­tions and envi­ron­ment from which the cloud was cre­ated, and the deci­sions made about what tags to present and how to present them. Fig­ure 9 sum­ma­rizes the idea of con­text.
Fig­ure 9: Cloud Con­text

Once the user or con­sumer places the tag cloud in con­text, the chain of under­stand­ing is com­plete, and they can being to use or work with the tag cloud. Fig­ure 10 shows the com­plete chain of under­stand­ing we’ve exam­ined.
Fig­ure 10 Chain of Under­stand­ing

In part two, titled “Sec­ond Gen­er­a­tion Tag Clouds”, I’ll share some thoughts on likely ways that the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion of tag clouds will evolve in struc­ture and usage in the near future, based on how they sup­port a chain of under­stand­ing that seman­ti­cally links tag­gers and tag cloud con­sumers. Con­text is the key for tag cloud con­sumers, and we’ll see how it affects the likely evo­lu­tion of the tag cloud as a visu­al­iza­tion tool.
Update: Part two Sec­ond Gen­er­a­tion Tag Clouds is available