archive.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

A few months ago, I put up a posted called Tagging Comes To Starbucks, in which I attempted to make the point that it’s bizarre when a product’s metadata *overwhelms the experience of the product itself in it’s customary real world setting*.
My example was the metadata encrusted packaging of madeleines – “petite french cakes…” – at Starbucks. Like the famous toothpick instructions Douglas Adams immortalized in So Long and Thanks For All The Fish, this is a strong discontinuity of experience (though not necessarily one indicating things gone awry at the core of civilization) that implies new cognitive / perceptual phenomenon.
New experiences and frames of reference usually lack descriptive vocabulary, which explains why I can’t pin this down neatly in words. But this is surely something we can expect to encounter more in a future populated with findable things called spimes.
The balance hasn’t shifted so far that we’re living inside Baudrillard’s ‘desert of the real’, but we are getting closer with each additional layer of simulation, abstraction, and metadata applied to real situations and objects.
After all it is impossible to interact (smell, touch, taste…) directly with these very ordinary pastries without experiencing the intervening layers of metadata packaging.
Madeleines in situ:

The labeling:

From SLATFATF: “It seemed to me that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization I could live in and stay sane.” ~ Wonko the Sane

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Getting coffee this afternoon, I saw several packages of tasy looking madeleines sitting in front of the register at Starbucks. For the not small number of people who don’t know that shell shaped pastries made with butter are called madeleines – not everyone has seen The Transporter yet – the package was helpfully labeled “Madeleines”.

Proving that tagging as a practice has gone too far, right below the word madeleines, the label offered the words “tasty French pastry”.

Just in case the customers looking at the clear plastic package aren’t capable of correctly identifying a pastry?
Or to support the large population who can’t decide for themselves what qualifies as tasty?

OCLC has caught the socially constructed metadata fever. A release on the OCLC site titled “User-contributed content pilot” discusses a pilot program to allow Open WorldCat users to add publicly visible metadata, in the form of reviews and descriptive details, to existing records.
This looks the latest step in the wave of exploration of methods and models for putting socially constructed metadata into practice that’s playing out in public. (Is this necessarily done in public? I’m curious to hear thoughts on how this might be done with closed or cloaked communities, like IBM’s intranet).
Broadly, it looks like a wide variety of entities are following the standard new product or service development cycle with regards to socially constructed metadata. A simplified version of this cycle is:
1.Conceptualization, technology development
2.Product development
3.Introduction to market
4.Market Acceptance and growth
5.Ongoing Market as conventional product
A quick review of known social bookmarking / tagging ventures distributed over a number of organizations supports the idea that each experiment is at one of these stages.
Some visualizations of development and prototype cycles are available here, and here.
Where’s it headed? I think we’ll see at least forms forms or applications of socially constructed metadata stabilize and become publicly recognized and accepted in the near future, with more on the way that will surprise everyone. Those four are:
1. Fee for services models, paying for access to premium quality pools of collectively managed information under professional (paid) editorial custody. OCLC could adopt this model.
2. Non-commercial community driven pools of social knowledge. This might be delicio.us.
3. Deployment as an enabler or attribute of other product / service models. Flickr is an example of this perhaps.
4. Publicly free but commercialized information mining operations, deriving salable value from formalizing the semantic relationships between people, groups, and information objects. TagCloud.com might fall into this group, or maybe Cloudalicious.
5. Something very innovative I will wish I’d thought of when it’s released.
Excerpts from the OCLC release:
“As of October 9, 2005, Open WorldCat users are able to add their own content to authoritative WorldCat information about library-held titles. Available under the Details and Reviews tabs, this functionality permits those who have located library items through Open WorldCat to return to the interface and add evaluative content.”
“User-contributed content will help extend the OCLC cataloging cooperative to include non-cataloging library professionals and – more importantly – patrons. Their shared participation in WorldCat content creation and management could foster a larger sense of library-centered community and generate more interest in library resources.”

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Looks like Dave Sifry at Technorati has drunk the Clay Shirky Koolaid on tagging and social bookmarking. Here’s something from Dave’s posting State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 3: Tags, that shows he’s clearly joined the academy of received ideas.
“Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that many people dislike using, the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives leads to a rich and discoverable system, often called a folksonomy. Intelligence is provided by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy may outperform more structured approches to classification, as Clay Shirky points out…”

I’m disappointed to see this. The quality level of Shirky’s thinking and writing related to tagging is generally low; too often he’s so completely off the mark with much of what he’s said about tagging, social bookmarking, and categorization in general that his main contribution is in lending a certain amount of attention by virtue of name recognition to a subject that used to be arcane.

There’s little need to rehash the many, many individual weaknesses in Shirky’s writings, just one example of which is his establishment of a false dichotomy separating structured categorization systems and social tagging practices. Broadly, his approach and rhetoric show strong influence from anarchism, and utopian social theory.

From Shirky:
“There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else’s needs, interests, or requirements.”
Further, “…with tagging, anyone is free to use the words he or she thinks are appropriate, without having to agree with anyone else about how something “should” be tagged.”

Building back on the criticique of computerization, it’s clear that Shirky uses rhetorical strategies and positions from both technological utopianism and anti-utopianism.

Here’s Professor Rob Kling on technological utopianism:
“Utopian images are common in many books and articles about computerization in society written by technologists and journalists. I am particularly interested in what can be learned, and how we can be misled, by a particular brand of utopian thought — technological utopianism. This line of analysis places the use of some specific technology, such as computers, nuclear energy, or low-energy low-impact technologies, as key enabling elements of a utopian vision. Sometimes people will casually refer to exotic technologies — like pocket computers which understand spoken language — as “utopian gadgets.”

Technological utopianism does not refer to these technologies with amazing capabilities. It refers to analyses in which the use of specific technologies plays a key role in shaping a benign social vision. In contrast, technological anti-utopianism examines how certain broad families of technology are key enablers of a harsher and more destructive social order.”

That Shirky would take speak from this standpoint is not a surprise; he’s identified as a “Decentralization Writer/Consultant” in the description of his session “Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata” at etech, and it’s clear that he’s both technologist and a journalist, as Kilng identifies.

Regardless of Shirky’s bias, there is a bigger picture worth examining. Tagging or social bookmarking is one potential way for the community of social metadata system users to confront problems of individual and group information overload, via a collective and nominally unhierarchical approach to the emergent problem of information management across common resources (URIs).

The April issue of D-Lib Magazine includes a two-part Survey of social bookmarking tools.
Social bookmarking is on the collective brain – at least for the moment -and most of those writing about it choose to take one or more positions for, against, or orthogonal to its various aspects. Here’s the position of the D-Lib survey authors:
“Despite all the current hype about tags – in the blogging world, especially – for the authors of this paper, tags are just one kind of metadata and are not a replacement for formal classification systems such as Dublin Core, MODS, etc. [n15]. Rather, they are a supplemental means to organize information and order search results.”
This is — no surprise from “a solely electronic publication with a primary focus on digital library research and development, including but not limited to new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues” — the librarians’ view, succinctly echoed by Peter Morville in his presentation during the panel ‘Sorting Out Social Classification’ at this year’s Information Architecture summit.
The D-Lib authors’ assessment dovetails nicely with Peter’s views on The Speed of Information Architecture from 2001, and it shows how library science professionals may decide to place social bookmarking in relation to the larger context of meta-data lifecycles; a realm they’ve known and inhabited for far longer than most people have used Flickr to tag their photos.
I found some of the authors’ conclusions more surprising. They say, “In many ways these new tools resemble blogs stripped down to the bare essentials.” I’m not sure what this means; stripped-down is the sort of term that usually connotes a minimalist refactoring or adaptation that is designed to emphasize the fundamental aspects of some original thing under interpretation, but I don’t think they want readers to take away the notion that social bookmarking is an interpretation of blogging.
Moving on, they say, “Here the essential unit of information is a link, not a story, but a link decorated with a title, a description, tags and perhaps even personal recommendation points.” which leaves me wondering why it’s useful to compare Furl to blogging?
A cultural studies professor of mine used to say of career academics, “We decide what things mean for a living”. I suspect this is what the D-Lib authors were working toward with their blogging comparison. Since the label space for this thing itself is a bit crowded (contenders being ethnoclassification, folksonomy, social classification), it makes better sense to elevate the arena of your own territorial claim to a higher level that is less cluttered with other claimants, and decide how it relates to something well-known and more established.
They close with, “It is still uncertain whether tagging will take off in the way that blogging has. And even if it does, nobody yet knows exactly what it will achieve or where it will go – but the road ahead beckons.”
This is somewhat uninspiring, but I assume it satisfies the XML schema requirement that every well-structured review or essay end with a conclusion that opens the door to future publications.
Don’t mistake my pique at the squishiness of their conclusions for dis-satisfaction with the body of the survey; overall, the piece is well-researched and offers good context and perspective on the antecedents of and concepts behind their subject. Their invocation of Tim O’Reilly’s ‘architectures of participation’ is just one example of the value of this survey as an entry point into related phenomena.
Another good point the D-Lib authors make is the way that the inherent locality, or context-specificity, of collections of social bookmarks allows them to provide higher-quality pointers to resources relevant for specialized purposes than the major search engines, which by default index globally, or without an editorial perspective.
Likely most useful for the survey reader is their set of references, which taps into the meme flow for social bookmarking by citing a range of source conversations, editorials, and postings from all sides of the phenomenon.

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