Tag: information_management


Discovery and the Age of Insight

August 21st, 2013 — 12:00am

Several weeks ago, I was invited to speak to an audience of IT and business leaders at Walmart about the Language of Discovery.   Every presentation is a feedback opportunity as much as a chance to broadcast our latest thinking (a tenet of what I call lean strategy practice – musicians call it trying out new material), so I make a point to share evolving ideas and synthesize what we’ve learned since the last instance of public dialog.

For the audience at Walmart, as part of the broader framing for the Age of Insight, I took the opportunity to share findings from some of the recent research we’ve done on Data Science (that’s right, we’re studying data science).  We’ve engaged consistently with data science practitioners for several years now (some of the field’s leaders are alumni of Endeca), as part of our ongoing effort to understand the changing nature of analytical and sense making activities, the people undertaking them, and the contexts in which they take place.  We’ve seen the discipline emerge from an esoteric specialty into full mainstream visibility for the business community.  Interpreting what we’ve learned about data science through a structural and historic perspective lead me to draw a broad parallel between data science now and natural philosophy at its early stages of evolution.

We also shared some exciting new models for enterprise information engagement; crafting scenarios using the language of discovery to describe information needs and activity at the level of discovery architecture, IT portfolio planning,  and knowledge management (which correspond to UX, technology, and business perspectives as applied to larger scales and via business dialog) – demonstrating the versatility of the language as a source of linkage across separate disciplines.

But the primary message I wanted to share is that discovery is the most important organizational capability for the era.  More on this in follow up postings that focus on smaller chunks of the thinking encapsulated in the full deck of slides.

Discovery and the Age of Insight: Walmart EIM Open House 2013 from Joe Lamantia

Comment » | Language of Discovery

New Books: ‘Tagging’ and ‘Mental Models’

March 12th, 2008 — 12:00am

If you’re interested in tagging and social metadata, social bookmarking, or information management, be sure to check out Gene Smith’s Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web recently published by from New Riders. I reviewed some of the early drafts of the book, and it’s come together very nicely.
tagging_cover.jpg
Tagging takes a very practical approach, and provides an ample set of examples in support of the insightful analysis. After an overview of tagging and its value, the book addresses tagging system design, tags in relation to traditional metadata and classification systems, and covers the user experience of creating and navigating tag clouds.

Gene likes to build things, so Tagging includes a chapter on technical design complete with suggested tools and tutorials for creating your own tagging apps.

All in all, Tagging is a worthy introduction to the subject, and a guide for deeper exploration.
While we’re talking books, kudos to Rosenfeld Media on the publication of their first book, Mental Models; Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, by the very talented Indi Young!
mental-models-lg.gif
Mental Models is richly illustrated, filled with examples, lucid, and accompanied by a considerable amount of additional content from the Rosenfeld Media website.

Indi has considerable experience teaching others the techniques and methods behind creating insightful mental models for audiences and customers. Cognitive / frameworky methods can feel a bit heady at times (especially how-to’s on those methods), but Mental Models is straightforward reading throughout, and an eminently practical guide to using this important tool for user experience design and strategy.

Mental Models is available electronically as a .pdf for individual and group licenses, or in hard copy; it’s choose your own medium in action.

Comment » | Reading Room, Tag Clouds, User Experience (UX), User Research

Setting Expectations for Taxonomy Efforts

September 30th, 2006 — 12:00am

Setting good expectations for the outcomes of a taxonomy design effort is often difficult. It can be especially if any of the following are true:

  • The goal is to create an initial taxonomy, and no reference exists
  • The solution environment the taxonomy will “live in” is in flux (owners, tools, governance…)
  • The business scope which the taxonomy will address is not well defined
  • Organizational awareness of taxonomy concepts and is low
  • Organizational maturity and experience with managing information architectures and metadata is low

When dealing with situations like these, consider changing the emphasis and goals of the effort to a “taxonomy pilot”. This will shift the expectations you need to meet from creating a production-ready taxonomy that can stand on its own something more reasonable, such as an interim taxonomy that effectively solves a limited scope problem, while setting in motion a well balanced taxonomy effort likely to be successful in the longer term.
The objectives of a taxonomy pilot effort that balances short and long term business needs in this way could be:

The project plan for a pilot taxonomy effort aiming to achieve the objectives above should further a culture of learning, rather than scope of accomplishment. This kind of plan would:

  • Establish frequent checkpoints that bring all interested parties together to discuss the process itself, in addition to accomplishments and milestones
  • Create regular forums where taxonomy designers and business sponsors make decisions on tools and standards with guidance from qualified experts
  • Incorporate multiple iterations or cycles of user driven review and revision of in-progress taxonomies
  • Include time for the creation of “next time” recommendations for what to do differently or the same as a group

Of course, it’s not always possible to change expectations, especially after funding and timelines are set. When expectations are unreasonable and set stone, take shelter in the inevitable “next version” and frame the taxonomy you’re designing as an initial effort that will require subsequent revision…

Comment » | Information Architecture

Tag Clouds: “A New User Interface?”

May 3rd, 2006 — 12:00am

In Pivoting on tags to create better navigation UI Matt McAllister offers the idea that we’re seeing “a new user interface evolving out of tag data,” and uses Wikio as an example. For context, he places tag clouds within a continuum of the evolution of web navigation, from list views to the new tag-based navigation emerging now.

It’s an insightful post, and it allows me to build on strong groundwork to talk more about why and how tag clouds differ from earlier forms of navigation, and will become [part of] a new user interface.
Matt identifies five ‘leaps’ in web navigation interfaces that I’ll summarize:

A Lesson in ‘Listory’
As Matt mentions, all four predecessors to tag based navigation are really variations on the underlying form of the list. There’s useful history in the evolution of lists as web navigation tools. Early lists used for navigation were static, chosen by a site owner, ordered, and flat: recall the lists of favorite sites that appeared at the bottom of so many early personal home pages.

These basic navigation lists evolved a variety of ordering schemes, (alphabetical, numeric), began to incorporate hierarchy (shown as sub-menus in navigation systems, or as indenting in the left-column Matt mentions), and allowed users to change their ordering, for example by sorting on a variety of fields or columns in search results.

From static lists whose contents do not change rapidly and reflect a single point of view, the lists employed for web navigation and search results then became dynamic, personalized, and reflective of multiple points of view. Amazon and other e-commerce destinations offered recently viewed items (yours or others), things most requested, sets bounded by date (published last year), sets driven by varying parameters (related articles), and lists determined by the navigation choices of others who followed similar paths.)

But they remained fundamentally lists. They itemized or enumerated choices of one kind or another, indicated implicit or explicit precedence through ordering or the absence of ordering, and were designed for linear interaction patterns: start at the beginning (or the end, if you preferred an alternative perspective – I still habitually read magazines from back to front…) and work your way through.

Tag clouds are different from lists, often by contents and presentation, and more importantly by basic assumption about the kind of interaction they encourage. On tag-based navigation Matt says, “This is a new layer that preempts the search box in a way. The visual representation of it is a tag cloud, but the interaction is more like a pivot.” Matt’s mention of the interaction hits on an important aspect that’s key to understanding the differences between clouds and lists: clouds are not linear, and are not designed for linear consumption in the fashion of lists.

I’m not saying that no one will read clouds left to right (with Roman alphabets), or right to left if they’re in Hebrew, or in any other way. I’m saying that tag clouds are not meant for ‘reading’ in the same way that lists are. As they’re commonly visualized today, clouds support multiple entry points using visual differentiators such as color and size.

Starting in the middle of a list and wandering around just increases the amount of visual and cognitive work involved, since you need to remember where you started to complete your survey. Starting in the “middle” of a tag cloud – if there is such a location – with a brightly colored and big juicy visual morsel is *exactly* what you’re supposed to do. It could save you quite a lot of time and effort, if the cloud is well designed and properly rendered.

Kunal Anand created a visualization of the intersections of his del.icio.us tags that shows the differences between a cloud and a list nicely. This is at heart a picture, and accordingly you can start looking at it anywhere / anyway you prefer.

Visualizing My Del.icio.us Tags

We all know what a list looks like…

iTunes Play Lists

What’s In a Name?
Describing a tag cloud as a weighted list (I did until I’d thought about it further) misses this important qualitative difference, and reflects our early stages of understanding of tag clouds. The term “weighted list” is a list-centered view of tag clouds that comes from the preceding frame of reference. It’s akin to describing a computer as an “arithmetic engine”, or the printing press as “movable type”.

[Aside: The label for tag clouds will probably change, as we develop concepts and language to frame new the user experiences and information environments that include clouds. For example, the language Matt uses – the word ‘pivot’ when he talks about the experience of navigating via the tag cloud in Wikio, not the word ‘follow’ which is a default for describing navigation – in the posting and his screencast reflects a possible shift in framing.]

A Camera Obscura For the Semantic Landscape
I’ve come to think of a tag cloud as something like the image produced by a camera obscura.
Camera Obscura
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Where the camera obscura renders a real-world landscape, a tag cloud shows a semantic landscape like those created by Amber Frid-Jimenez at MIT.

Semantic Landscape

Semantic Landscape

Like a camera obscura image, a tag cloud is a filtered visualization of a multidimensional world. Unlike a camera obscura image, a tag cloud allows movement within the landscape. And unlike a list, tag clouds can and do show relationships more complex than one-dimensional linearity (experienced as precedence). This ability to show more than one dimension allows clouds to reflect the structure of the environment they visualize, as well as the contents of that environment. This frees tag clouds from the limitation of simply itemizing or enumerating the contents of a set, which is the fundamental achievement of a list.

Earlier, I shared some observations on the structural evolution – from static and flat to hierarchical and dynamic – of the lists used as web navigation mechanisms. As I’ve ventured elsewhere, we may see a similar evolution in tag clouds.

It is already clear that we’re witnessing evolution in the presentation of tag clouds in step with their greater visualizatin capabilities. Clouds now rely on an expanding variety of visual cues to show an increasingly detailed view of the underlying semantic landscape: proximity, depth, brightness, intensity, color of item, color of field around item. I expect clouds will develop other cues to help depict the many connections (permanent or temporary) linking the labels in a tag cloud. It’s possible that tag clouds will offer a user experience similar to some of the ontology management tools available now.

Is this “a new user interface”? That depends on how you define new. In Shaping Things, author and futurist Bruce Sterling suggests, “the future composts the past” – meaning that new elements are subsumed into the accumulation of layers past and present. In the context of navigation systems and tag clouds, that implies that we’ll see mixtures of lists from the four previous stages of navigation interface, and clouds from the latest leap; a fusion of old and new.

Examples of this composting abound, from 30daytags.com to Wikio that Matt McAllister examined.

30DayTags.com Tag Clouds

Wikio Tag Cloud

As lists encouraged linear interactions as a result of their structure, it’s possible that new user interfaces relying on tag clouds will encourage different kinds of seeking or finding behaviors within information experiences. In “The endangered joy of serendipity” William McKeen bemoans the decrease of serendipity as a result of precisely directed and targeted media, searching, and interactions. Tag clouds – by offering many connections and multiple entry paths simultaneously – may help rejuvenate serendipity in danger in a world of closely focused lists.

Comment » | Ideas, Tag Clouds

Second Generation Tag Clouds

February 23rd, 2006 — 12:00am

Lets build on the analysis of tag clouds from Tag Clouds Evolve: Understanding Tag Clouds, and look ahead at what the near future may hold for second generation tag clouds (perhaps over the next 12 to 18 months). As you read these predictions for structural and usage changes, keep two conclusions from the previous post in mind: first, adequate context is critical to sustaining the chain of understanding necessary for successful tag clouds; second, one of the most valuable aspects of tag clouds is as visualizations of semantic fields.

Based on this understanding, expect to see two broad trends second in generation tag clouds.
In the first instance, tag clouds will continue to become recognizable and comprehensible to a greater share of users as they move down the novelty curve from nouveau to known. In step with this growing awareness and familiarity, tag cloud usage will become:
1. More frequent
2. More common
3. More specialized
4. More sophisticated

In the second instance, tag cloud structures and interactions will become more complex. Expect to see:
1. More support for cloud consumers to meet their needs for context
2. Refined presentation of the semantic fields underlying clouds
3. Attached controls or features and functionality that allow cloud consumers to directly change the context, content, and presentation of clouds

Together, these broad trends mean we can expect to see a second generation of numerous and diverse tag clouds valued for content and capability over form. Second generation clouds will be easier to understand (when designed correctly…) and open to manipulation by users via increased functionality. In this way, clouds will visualize semantic fields for a greater range of situations and needs, across a greater range of specificity, in a greater diversity of information environments, for a greater number of more varied cloud consumers.

Usage Trends
To date, tag clouds have been applied to just a few kinds of focuses (links, photos, albums, blog posts are the more recognizable). In the future, expect to see specialized tag cloud implementations emerge for a tremendous variety of semantic fields and focuses: celebrities, cars, properties or homes for sale, hotels and travel destinations, products, sports teams, media of all types, political campaigns, financial markets, brands, etc.

From a business viewpoint, these tag cloud implementations will aim to advance business ventures exploring the potential value of aggregating and exposing semantic fields for a variety of strategic purposes:
1. Creating new markets
2. Understanding or changing existing markets
3. Providing value-added services
4. Establishing communities of interest / need / activity
5. Aiding oversight and regulatory imperatives for transparency and accountability.

Measurement and Insight
I think tag clouds will continue to develop as an important potential measurement and assessment vehicle for a wide variety of purposes; cloudalicious is a good example of an early use of tag clouds for insight. Other applications could include using tag clouds to present metadata in geospatial or spatiosemantic settings that combine GPS / GIS and RDF concept / knowledge structures.
Within the realm of user experience, expect to see new user research and customer insight techniques emerge that employ tag clouds as visualizations and instantiations of semantic fields. Maybe even cloud sorting?

Clouds As Navigation
Turning from the strategic to the tactical realm of experience design and information architecture, I expect tag clouds to play a growing role in the navigation of information environments as they become more common. Navigational applications comprise one of the first areas of tag cloud application. Though navigation represents a fairly narrow usage of tag clouds, in light of their considerable potential in reifying semantic fields to render them actionable, I expect navigational settings will continue to serve as a primary experimental and evolutionary venue for learning how clouds can enhance larger goals for information environments such as enhanced findability.

For new information environments, the rules for tag clouds as navigation components are largely unwritten. But many information environments already have mature navigation systems. In these settings, tag clouds will be one new type of navigation mechanism that information architects and user experience designers integrate with existing navigation mechanisms. David Fiorito’s and Richard Dalton’s presentation Creating a Consistent Enterprise Web Navigation Solution is a good framework / introduction for questions about how tag clouds might integrate into mature or existing navigation systems. Within their matrix of structural, associative and utility navigation modes that are invoked at varying levels of proximity to content, tag clouds have obvious strengths in the associative mode, at all levels of proximity to content, and potential strength in the structural mode. Figure 1 shows two tag clouds playing associative roles in a simple hypothetical navigation system.

Figure 1: Associative Clouds

I also expect navigation systems will feature multiple instances of different types of tag clouds. Navigation systems employing multiple clouds will use combinations of clouds from varying contexts (as flickr and technorati already do) or domains within a larger information environment to support a wide variety of purposes, including implicit and explicit comparison, or views of the environment at multiple levels of granularity or resolution (high level / low level). Figure 2 illustrates multiple clouds, Figure 3 shows clouds used to compare the semantic fields of a one focus chosen from a list, and Figure 4 shows a hierarchical layout of navigational tag clouds.

Figure 2: Multiple Clouds

Figure 3: Cloud Comparison Layout

Figure 4: Primary / Secondary Layout

Structural and Behavioral Trends
Let’s move on to consider structural and behavioral trends in the second generation of tag clouds.
Given the success of the simple yet flexible structure of first generation tag clouds, I expect that second generation clouds will not substantially change their basic structure. For example, tag clouds will not have to change to make use of changing tagging practices that enhance the semantic depth and quality of tags applied to a focus, such as faceted tagging, use of qualifiers, hierarchical tagging, and other forms. James Melzer identifies some best practices on del.icio.us that make considerable sense when the focus of a semantic field is a link. His recommendations include:

  • Source your information with via:source_name or cite:source_name
  • Create a parent categories, and thus a rudimentary hierarchy, with parent_tag/subject_tag
  • Mention publications names with in:publication_name
  • Flag the type of resource with .extension or =resource_type
  • Use a combination of general and specific tags on every bookmark to provide both clustering and differentiation
  • Use synonyms or alternate forms of tags
  • Use unique or distinctive terms from documents as tags (don’t just use major subject terms)

The two element structure of first generation tag clouds can accommodate these tagging practices. However, with a semantic field of greater depth and richness available, the interactions, behaviors, and presentation of tag clouds will evolve beyond a static set of hyperlinks.

Cloud consumers’ need for better context will drive the addition of features and functionality that identify the context of a tag cloud explicitly and in detail. For example, clouds created by a defined audience will identify that audience, whether it be system administrators, freelance web designers, DJ’s, or pastry chefs rating recipes and cooking equipment and provide indication of the scope and time periods that bound the set of tags presented in the cloud. Flickr and others do this already, offering clouds of tags covering different intervals of time to account for the changing popularity of tags over their lifespan.

Moving from passive to interactive, tag clouds will allow users to change the cloud’s semantic focus or context with controls, filters, or other parameters (did someone say ‘sliders’ – or is that too 5 minutes ago…?). I’ve seen several public requests for these sorts of features, like this one: “It would be great if I could set preferences for items such as time frame or for tags that are relevant to a particular area etc or even colour the most recent tags a fiery red or remove the most recent tags.” Figure 5 shows a tag cloud with context controls attached.

Figure 5: Context Controls
context_control.gif
Figure 6: Behavior Controls
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Diversifying consumer needs and goals for way finding, orientation, information retrieval, task support, product promotion, etc., will bring about inverted tag clouds. Inverted tag clouds will center on a tag and depict all focuses carrying that tag.

Figure 7: Inverted Clouds Show Conceptually Related Focuses
focus_cloud.gif
In the vein of continued experiment, tag clouds will take increased advantage with RIA / AJAX and other user experience construction methods. Following this, tag clouds may take on some of the functions of known navigation elements, appearing as sub-menus / drop down menus offering secondary navigation choices.

Figure 8: Clouds As Drop Menus

Along the same lines, tag clouds will demonstrate more complex interactions, such as spawning other tag clouds that act like magnifying lenses. These overlapping tag clouds may offer: multiple levels of granularity (a general view and zoom view) of a semantic field; thesaurus style views of related concepts; parameter driven term expansion; common types of relationship (other people bought, by the same author, synonyms, previously known as, etc.)

Figure 9: Magnifying Clouds
cloud_lens.gif
Genres
Looking at the intersection of usage and behavior trends, I expect tag clouds will evolve, differentiate, and develop into standard genres. Genres will consist of a stable combination of tag cloud content, context, usage, functionality, and behavior within different environments. The same business and user goals that support genres in other media and modes of visualization will drive the development of these tag cloud genres. One genre I expect to see emerge shortly is the search result.

Conclusions
Reading over the list, I see this is an aggressive set of predictions. It’s fair to ask if I really have such high expectations for tag clouds? I can’t say tag clouds will take over the world, or even the Internet. But I do believe that they fill a gap in our collective visualization toolset. The quantity, quality, and relevance of semantic information in both real and virtual environments is constantly increasing. (In fact, the rate of increase is itself increasing, though that is a temporary phenomenon.) I think tag clouds offer a potential to quickly and easily support the chain of understanding that’s necessary for semantic fields across diverse kinds of focuses. There’s need for that in many quarters, and I expect that need to continue to grow.

For the moment, it seems obvious that tag clouds will spend a while in an early experimental phase, and then move into an awkward adolescent phase, as features, applications and genres stabilize in line with growing awareness and comfort with clouds in various settings.

I expect these predictions to be tested by experiments will play out quickly and in semi or fully public settings, as in the example of the dialog surrounding 83 degrees usage of a tag cloud as the sole navigation mechanism on their site that Rashmi Sinha’s post The tag-cloud replaces the basic menu – Is this a good idea? kicked off recently.

My answer to this question is that replacing all navigation menus with a tag cloud is only a good idea under very limited circumstances. It’s possible that 83 Degrees may be one of these limited instances. Startups can benefit considerably from any positive attention from the Web’s early adopter community (witness Don’t Blow Your Beta by Michael Arrington of Techcrunch).

The page’s designer said, “In this case it was done as a design/marketing effort and not at all for UI”. Since attracting attention was the specific purpose, I think the result is a success. But it’s still an experimental usage, and that’s consistent with the early stage of evolution / development of tag clouds in general.

I’m looking forward to what happens next…

Comment » | Ideas, Tag Clouds

Tag Clouds Evolve: Understanding Tag Clouds

February 22nd, 2006 — 12:00am

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
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Figure 2: last.fm
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Figure 3: technorati
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Figure 4: del.icio.us
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Figure 5: Ma.gnolia
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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
origin.gif
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
semantic_field.gif
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
field_as_cloud.gif
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
chain_of_understanding.gif

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

Comment » | Ideas, Tag Clouds

Belated 2006 Prediction #1

February 1st, 2006 — 12:00am

It’s only February, but I can already tell that I’m going to say “SharePoint is *not* an intranet!” many, many, many times in 2006…

Comment » | Intranets

Hallmark of the New Enterprise: Knowledge Markets

January 30th, 2006 — 12:00am

Using the automotive industry and an analogous variety of software mega-packages with three-letter acronyms as examples, we’ve been discussing the death of the traditional enterprise for a few weeks. We’ve observed that enterprise efforts relying on massive top-down approaches become inefficient and wasteful, if not counter-productive. They also either fail to support the health of the individuals or groups involved – customers, users, sellers, employers – or in fact directly reduce the relative health of these parties. With Conway’s Law as a guide, we discovered that the structure or form of an organization influences or determines the nature and quality of the things the organization creates.
This all concerns the past: so now it’s time to look ahead, at the new enterprise. Of course, scrying the future inevitably relies on a mixture of hand waving, vague pronouncements, and the occasional “it’s not possible yet to do what this implies” to point the way forward. What’s often lacking is a present-tense example to serve as clear harbinger of the future to come. I came across an example today, drawn from the debate surrounding the proposition that the U.S. Army is close to a breaking point. In an episode of On Point titled Are US Forces Stretched Too Thin?, several panelists (names not available from the program website yet) made three telling points about the Army that show it as an organization in transition from the old model enterprise into a new form, albeit one whose outlines remain fuzzy. I’ll paraphrase these points:

To support this practice, company commanders created a forum for sharing innovations amongst themselves, called CO Team: CompanyCommand. The description reads, “CompanyCommand.com is company commanders-present, future, and past. We are in an ongoing professional conversation about leading soldiers and building combat-ready units. The conversation is taking place on front porches, around HMMWV hoods, in CPs, mess halls, and FOBs around the world. By engaging in this ongoing conversation centered around leading soldiers, we are becoming more effective leaders, and we are growing units that are more effective. Amazing things happen when committed leaders in a profession connect, share what they are learning, and spur each other on to become better and better.”
It’s the third point that gives us a clue about the nature of the new enterprise. CompanyCommand.com is an example of a ‘knowledge marketplace’ created and maintained by an informal network within an organization. Knowledge marketplaces are one of the components of what McKinsey calls The 21st Century Organization. Knowledge marketplaces allow knowledge buyers “to gain access to content that is more insightful and relevant, as well as easier to find and assimilate, than alternative sources are.”
McKinsey believes that these markets – as well as companion forms for exchanging valuable human assets called talent markets – require careful investment to begin functioning.
“…working markets need objects of value for trading, to say nothing of prices, exchange mechanisms, and competition among suppliers. In addition, standards, protocols, regulations, and market facilitators often help markets to work better. These conditions don’t exist naturally – a knowledge marketplace is an artificial, managed one – so companies must put them in place.”
On this, I disagree. CompanyCommand is an example of a proto-form knowledge marketplace that appears to be self-organized and regulated.
Moving on, another component of the new enterprise identifed by McKinsey is the formal network. A formal network “…enables people who share common interests to collaborate with relatively little ambiguity about decision-making authority – ambiguity that generates internal organizational complications and tension in matrixed structures.”
In McKinsey’s analysis, formal networks contrast with informal social networks in several ways. Formal networks require designated owners responsible for building common capabilities and determining investment levels, incentives for membership, defined boundaries or territories, established standards and protocols, and shared infrastructure or technology platforms.
My guess is that CompanyCommand again meets all these formal network criteria to a partial extent, which is why it is a good harbinger of the forms common to the new enterprise, and a sign of an organization in transition.
Can you think of other examples of new enterprise forms, or organizations in transition?
In the next post in this series, we’ll move on from the structure of the new enterprise to talk about the new enterprise experience, trying to track a number of trends to understand their implications for the user experience of the new enterprise environment.

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Enterprise Software is Dead! Long Live… Thingamy?

January 5th, 2006 — 12:00am

Peter Merholz observes that enterprise software is being eaten away from below, by applications such as Moveable Type, and innovators such as SocialText.
“These smaller point solutions, systems that actually address the challenges that people face (instead of simply creating more problems of their own, problems that require hiring service staff from the software developers), these solutions are going to spread throughout organizations and supplant enterprise software the same way that PCs supplanted mainframes.
I sure wouldn’t want to be working in enterprise software right now. Sure, it’s a massive industry, and it will take a long time to die, but the progression is clear, and, frankly, inevitable.”
Indeed it is. Though there’s considerable analyst hoopla about rising enterprise content management or ECM spending and IT investment (see also In Focus: Content Management Heats Up, Imaging Shifts Toward SMBs), we’re in the midst of a larger and longer term cycle of evolution in which cheaper, faster, more agile competitors to established market leaders are following the classic market entry strategy of attacking the bottom of the pyramid. (The pyramid is a hierarchical representation of a given market or set of products; at the top of the pyramid sit the more expensive and mature products which offer more features, capabilities, quality, or complexity; the lower levels of the pyramid include lower cost products which offer fewer features.)
What’s most interesting about the way this pattern is playing out in the arena of enterprise content management solutions is that the new competitors were not at first attacking from the bottom as a deliberate strategy, think of MoveableType, but they have quite quickly moved to this approach as with the recent release of Alfresco. The different origins of Sixapart and Alfresco may have some bearing on their different market entry approaches: Sixapart was a personal publishing platform that’s grown into a content management tool, whereas Alfresco’s intented audience was enterprise customers from day one. I’d wager the founders of Alfresco looked to RedHat as an example of a business model built on OpenSource software, and saw opportunity in the enterprise content management space, especially concerning user experience annd usability weaknesses in ECM platforms.
There’s an easy (if general) parallel in the automotive industry: from American dominance of the domestic U.S. market for automobiles in the post-WWII decades, successive waves of competitors moved into the U.S. automobile market from the bottom of the pyramid, offering less expensive or higher quality automobiles with the same or similar features. The major Japanese firms such as Honda, Toyota, and Nissan were first, followed by Korean firms such as Hyundai and Daewoo. It’s plain that some of the older companies sitting at the top of the pyramid are in fact dying, both literally and figuratively: GM is financially crippled and faces onerous financial burdens — to the point of bankruptcy – as it attempts to pay for the healthcare of it’s own aging (dying) workforce.
So what’s in the future?
For auto makers it’s possible that Chinese or South American manufacturers will be next to enter the domestic U.S. market, using similar attacks at the bottom of the pyramid.
For enterprise software, I think organizations will turn away from monolithic and expensive systems with terrible user experiences — and correspondingly low levels of satisfaction, quality, and efficacy — as the best means of meeting business needs, and shift to a mixed palette of semantically integrated capabilities or services delivered via the Internet. These capabilities will originate from diverse vendors or providers, and expose customized sets of functionality and information specific to the individual enterprise. Staff will access and encounter these capabilities via a multiplicity of channels and user experiences; dashboard or portal style aggregators, RIA rich internet applications, mobile devices, interfaces for RSS and other micro-content formats.
David Weinberger thinks it will be small pieces loosely joined together. A group of entrepreneurs thinks it might look something like what Thingamy claims to be.
Regardless, it’s surely no coincidence that I find a blog post on market pyramids and entry strategies put up by someone working at an enterprise software startup…

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Intranet Review Toolkit: Quick Heuristics Spreadsheet

December 2nd, 2005 — 12:00am

Update: Version 1.1 of the Intranet Review Toolkit is available as of 03/20/2006, and now includes a summary spreadsheet.
Thanks go to James Robertson for very gently reminding me that the licensing arrangements for the Intranet Review Toolkit preclude republishing it as a summarized form, such as the spreadsheet I posted earlier today. In my enthusiasm to share a tool with the rest of the community, I didn’t work through the full licensing implications…
Accordingly, I’ll be removing the spreadsheet from harms way immediately, while hoping it’s possible to make it available in a more legally acceptable form.
Apologies to James and the rest of the Toolkit team for any unintended harm from my oversight.

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