Category: There’s been a lot of good research on tag clouds lately — from usage evaluation (>33% users surveyed) at IA Summit, layout at WWW’07 to visual processing at Hypertext ‘08.
I’m a bit fan of tag clouds, yet sense there’s much more to be done. Marti Hearst’s recent work on tag clouds challenges their usefulness as a true visualization or UI, while other acknowledging benefits. More on that some other time…
Here’s a sampling of the best / most-representative stuff I found in a quick run through of the search startup SearchMe’s results… displayed in their new Stacks widget.
About 80% of them are from a half dozen queries I ran. The other 20% (mainly research articles) I had to manually add. The widget is quite slick, though I wish there were a few more items onscreen at one time. I’ve already asked the SearchMe folks when the API will be available for creating “stacks”. I’d love to hook this up to my delicious feed or build a widget to auto-create a stack for all of the links in a blog post.
Rich document previews for the web are here! I can’t help but wish for more — but most of the best ideas of HCI over the last 20 years are yet to be deployed to the masses. Hats off to the folks at SearchMe for the acumen and perserverance to get this feature to market.
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