DRX/tag

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Get off of my Tag Cloud

Despite Zeldman’s opinions on “tag clouds”, I find them rather interesting. I have opinions too. For instance, using SSI is so, like ancient history there buddy.

A tag cloud is really nothing but a weighted list, with a sprinkle of presentation (cough). I agree that their usefulness as a navigation method is questionable, at best. To be honest, I just felt like having a little fun by spending an hour or so implementing one. You’re going to need a little more horsepower than just SSI and CSS to do it yourself though.

And if you jump to the conclusion this list has no (social) merit because I’m the only “user” tagging items, then you’re missing the point entirely.

And that point is this—a structured hierarchy, a category taxonomy, I already have. Less formal tagging allows me to define relationships between categories. It allows me to present a broader perspective of Web development. To me, every category in this index is woven tightly together. So, if you’re thinking ontology, or controlled vocabulary (CV), then bingo. A Touchgraph would be considerably more interesting than a simple tag cloud.

Probably the best example of resources that don’t necessarily fit neatly into a single category are the Firefox extensions. Yes, they are all related to the browser. Often I will “file” them under some other tag (or tags) that is defined by the extension’s purpose. For instance, there are extensions that display Dublin Core, FOAF, geographic or other metadata. There are extensions that allow you to study, and even alter, the headers from any HTTP request/response. There is the wonderful Web Developer’s extension that, among many other features, allows you to view, as well as edit, the stylesheets of a site. There is Greasemonkey, that allows you to not only modify your view of another site, but also how that site behaves. And so on...

So hate it or love it, my cloud is always here to be pondered, used, or ignored. Reminders of weak spots, for me anyway, is probably the best use for it. At least in the top 100 tags.

Developers who would like to explore the backend of the tagging system are invited to use the dbrowse application, and in particular the tag and tag_map data views.

To view another drx tag distribution from the perspective of Yahoo! Search, visit the drx tagCloud (courtesy of tagCloud ). Also interesting is this cloudalicio.us graph of the top 26 tags over a one year period. And finally there is ZoomClouds, which is based soley on the tags and content extracted from the DRX Recent Additions RSS feed.