Chapter 5. Getting Your Head Out of the Tag Cloud

In Designing the Obvious, I mentioned a time that a designer came to me with a design for the sidebar of a blog template that included a tag cloud. The design also included two buttons—one for displaying a cloud, the other for displaying a list.

I’d like to expand on that story a bit, because I’ve learned a few things since writing Designing the Obvious that have changed my perspective.

If you don’t already know, a tag cloud is a list of links—usually linked tags—displayed in a block and weighted by popularity or some other criteria. The end result is what appears to be a “cloud” of links, like this one, from Flickr.

Flickr.com was the first major site to offer a tag cloud, but the idea has been copied ...

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