Now with tags

I recently tagged every entry on unraveled, which means that you can now browse my archives by labels or “tags”. This is probably much more useful for me than for you, but useful none the less.

A note on tag clouds

You’ll probably notice that I didn’t use a tag cloud. I was initially considering a tag cloud, but the more I seriously thought about it, the less useful it seemed.

While they’re relatively easy to implement using Movable Type and interesting as an information visualization technique, they’re crap for scanning, which is primarily what people will be doing here. This is evident on the mothership of tagging, del.icio.us. You can view tags alphabetically or by size (popularity). Alphabetic order is typically great for scanning items in a list, but not when they’re different sizes and listed left to right. Tag popularity is also useful, and at least when viewing by size the tags are more readable, but then the aspects that make a cloud useful for information visualization are lost.

What made the most sense to me is a vertical list (not a cloud) sorted alphabetically and by popularity. Next, I shaved off the tags that most readers are not likely to be looking for — i.e. most of them — and made them available in a separate, easy to access list. Because I’ve created a separate list for popular tags, the relative size of each tag becomes mostly irrelevant, so there wasn’t a need for different font sizes.

Tag clouds certainly have their place among visualization techniques, but they aren’t the best choice for unraveled, or, as I suspect, most other blogs.

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