William,
There was a thread some time ago in the IxDA list.
It started almost exactly as yours, and generally speaking the outcome
was that tag clouds are deceiving albeit trendy.
The list archives are in
http://lists.interactiondesigners.com/pipermail/discuss-interactiondesigners.com/
The thread(s) ran from Jan22 thru Feb03, and another one sprouted by 3/13/06.
--
Juan Lanus
TECNOSOL
Argentina
On 5/23/07, William Hudson (ACM) <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I was using a tag cloud the other day that had been created to display
> search results - the number of hits for each category determined tag
> size.
>
>
>
> I have to say that I found it very hard to ignore the large tags even
> when they were not relevant to me (the result I was looking for turned
> out to have a very small tag - but that's a posting for another day<g>).
> Has anyone else had this experience? Are there any studies on the
> usability of tag clouds or weighted lists? (A quick Google on "tag cloud
> usability" does not turn up much very useful.)
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> William Hudson
> Syntagm Ltd
> Design for Usability
> US Toll Free 1-866-SYNTAGM
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>
>
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