A survey of tag cloud presentation techniques

Mogens NielsenJune 6th 2007

Introduction

• About tag clouds– What and why?

• Current presentation techniques• New presentation techniques• Proof of concept

Intention

• Show current presentation techniques• Show new presentation techniques• Discuss different presentation techniques• Show suggestions to second generation tag

clouds

Method

• Literature study• Read weblogs to find general interest in tag

clouds• Proof of concept to show an example of a

second generation tag cloud

Contribution

• Tag clouds are a new information visualization interface

• Still in the ”prototype” phase• More users and areas of implementation leads

to more needs for functionality• Many suggestions to new techniques• This paper will try to gather the available

information (create ”order” in the ”chaos”)

Current presentation techniques

• First generation tag cloud (from Flickr)

Current presentation techniques

• Some limitations of the first generation tag cloud– Alphabetical arrangement does not infer

relationships between tags– One or more topics tend to dominate the cloud

with their tags– Static; no implementation of time– No interactivity

New presentation techniques

• Clustering tags in the tag cloud• Time management• Interactivity

Clustered tag clouds

• Shows relations between tags• Limits the synonym problem of tagging

(folksonomies)• Less significant tags disappears• Tags with higher meaning emerge and thereby

reducing semantic density• The dominating topics are less dominating

Clustered tag clouds

Temporal tag clouds

• Ability to discover trends and emerging tags• Shorter popularity decay gives us a less static

tag cloud• Cloudalicious: Shows how a webpage is

tagged over time• Google Trends: Shows search trends on

Google• Flickr: Three stages of tag cloud time frame

Interactive tag clouds

• Allow the user to choose the presentation of the tag cloud at her choice

• Interactivity gives the user a greater impact on which information the tag cloud should visualize

• No interactive tag clouds– Delicious Tagrolls

Proof of concept

• PoC to show a vision of abilities in a second generation tag cloud

• Implements interactivity which enables the user– To choose time frame– To zoom

Conclusion

• Tag clouds are in the starting phase as information visualization interfaces

• New implementations and presentation techniques are needed

• This paper intends to– Create an order in the chaos– Show a vision of a second generation tag cloud

Demo and questions

Thank you for listening