"Tag Clouds Are The New Mullets"

harrisj — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:55:33 -0700

Jeffrey Zeldman coins this lovely phrase in a mild criticism of tag clouds (see Tag Clouds Are The New Mullets) as the new senstation that's sweeping the nation:

Like mood rings and fanny packs, like mullets and the Macarena, the weighted tag clouds meme popularized by Flickr and Technorati is about to cross a permanent cultural shame threshold. Brilliant as the idea remains, faddishness is choking its air supply. Damned clouds are everywhere.

A tag cloud is one of those displays where they'll have a bunch of one-word tags as links and each link is sized based on how popular it is (more popular = larger font) You've probably seen them on places like Flickr or Del.icio.us. The problem snarkily alluded here by Zeldman is that tag clouds (like your favorite indie band) are not as cool when everybody knows about them, and it is dead certain you will see them sprouting up more and more, including commercial sites. The thing is, I don't personally think they are that brilliant. I'm no visual designer (paging Edward Tufte), but something seems to be missing for me. I know they are visually arresting and can provide a high-level view of comparative popularity, but looking at the things often gives me a real headache too. I would argue it's actually harder to find less-popular items in a tag cloud than it would be in an unadorned list (seeing the forest for the trees). And in accessibility terms, it's still no better than an ordered list with counts. For small lists, they're pointless and for large lists I find it easier to scroll down vertically than read down and across. I think there is a better interface out there and perhaps it will take the faddishness of tag clouds to give us the necessary backlash for something new.

Nimble Code: "Tag Clouds Are The New Mullets"

"Tag Clouds Are The New Mullets"