The dev blog for Justin Duewel-Zahniser's Chapbook poetry sharing web app project. I'm going to post random stuff here that's too big for the dev list and hopefully get conversations going with testers/users.

Do you care about tag clouds?

I’ve been increasingly wondering if the tag cloud in Chapbook is at all relevant.  Tags, certainly, because people should be able to classify poems according to user-generated schemes.  But, are you really going to look at a pile of tags and go find poems to read based on those?

Maybe.  But, I’ve never used the Flickr tag cloud and I do fine.  I mostly look at “top photos” and photos from friends or find photos via relationships or tags from other photos and not from a cold start.  Tag clouds add a nice discovery aspect, intellectually, but I don’t know how much they’ll be used.

I can always leave tag clouds in and take them out if no one uses them.  One of my goals, though, is as little clutter as I can get away with because any given written piece should be the most prominent text on the screen.  Flickr doesn’t have this challenge as much because large photos inherently stand out.

Okay, back to my day job.  That was good curry. 

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