Amy Allcock

Tagrolls are a handy way to display your del.icio.us tags as part of your website making it easy for yourself or anyone else to browse your bookmarks by topic tags. There are several customizations which can be done to display your tagroll using the del.icio.us service including specifying the order, size, and color of the tags. Using these customizations a lot of additional information about your tagging habits can be conveyed in a visual way. When creating my own tag cloud, I choose to use colors and sizes that would display additional information about my tags - a large font and a hot color (red) for my most popular tags and a smaller font with a cooler color (blue) for the less popular ones. I ended up with the following two tag clouds:

When displayed as a tagcloud sorted by frequency, you get a nice looking gradient that not only looks cool but that says a lot about my tagging preferences. When displayed as a tagcloud sorted alphabetically, you get a more ordered listing with “hotspots?��Ǩ�� representing the most popular tags. The alphabetically listing conveys the most information since it provides two ways to scan (alphabetical listing and visual clues to frequency) whereas the tagcloud sorted by frequency only allows for browsing by frequency, something which is enforced twice in this organization. Although I like how the gradient looks visually in the transition from hot to cool, I choose to go with the alphabetical ordering, as it is the easiest way to scan a list of information and the “hotspots”, given their color and size, provide a visually attractive and effective way to identify the most popular tags.

Originally published December 12, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.