After coming up blank on a robust tagging API for ASP.Net apps, and wanting to incorporate this functionality into new versions of most Speerio products, I decided to create one. Along the way, I took a good, hard look at many websites to see how they implemented the UI for tagging. In most cases, everyone ripped Flickr’s UI. This is fine, but in the process they also copied some of limitations of the Flickr UI.

I took a clean-slate approach and decided I wanted to communicate more than just popularity through the tag cloud. The relative age of an item is just as relevant as how often an item is tagged with a certain tag, therefore I decided to introduce the concept of “age” into my tagging API. At a glance, the tag cloud not only tells you which items are more popular, but also which ones have newer/older information.

This ability to convey both popularity and age through a single UI is going to be an important feature of the (clean-slate) discussion forum I am creating. Imagine if you will, a discussion forum that is devoid of categorized groups of sub-forums, with only a tag cloud for navigation. If you’re looking for a solution or an answer to a question, you can instantly find all posts relevant to a keyword of interest to you simply by clicking on it. And then, you can explore clusters of related information to find the handful of posts that are most applicable to your situation. No paging through hundreds of posts only to find content that has no bearing on your situation. And if you want to browse, just click on “age” and you’ll see the topics that have been most recently posted.

Getting back to the API, here’s a screen grab of the cloud which can be added to any ASP.Net page or control with one line of code. The entire UI is customizable with CSS and works identically on IE and FireFox (should work on other browsers too, but I haven’t tested).

I also wanted to automate the detection of clusters between tags and users. I didn’t think this was information that was relevant on the main cloud UI, so I created a context-menu which allows a user to display a cross-browser, modal dialog containing more information about the tag.

I’ll have more details about the tagging API soon and an online demo in the next few days.

Lately, I have become very interested in the whole tagging/folksonomy phenomenon that seems to be a defining element of Web 2.0. In particular, I am drawn to tag clusters. While tag clouds are great for exploring the relative importance of tags in a simple manner, they don't give you any clues about the relationships among tags. Tag clusters do just that. Rashmi Sinha explains clusters here very well, so I don't have to do it.

So far, I have not seen a very good navigation interface for tag clusters. Flickr tries in vain to provide "clustery goodness," but to be quite honest, their interface is quite lame. While bread-crumb navigation works well within a site, it is bad for navigating clusters because it prevents the user from doing what comes naturally -- exploring. Instead, it forces a single-step hierarchy navigation (which works well for websites) while the user's brain is probably accelerating with the brakes on wanting to see more clusters and the relationships between them.

I think clustering calls out for a Web 2.0 version of a hyperbolic interface. Hyperbolic interfaces lend themselves very well to providing a visual representation of graphs which is basically what tag clusters are (assuming you have a starting tag). You can see this in implementations such as Thinkmap's VisualThesaurus. Unfortunately, VisualThesaurus, like Inxight, went the Java route. This makes it a complete pain to use in any kind of quick and meaningful manner. An ideal solution would be a hyperbolic U.I. that is easily implemented using either Flash or XmlHttp (Ajax). This would be more usable since most people's browsers already support it.

I Googled and came up with only one Flash instance of a pseudo-hyperbolic U.I. that I liked. It was on a marketing company's site -- Renegade Marketing. I emailed them twice about getting the Flash source, free or for a fee. Both my polite inquiries were ignored. (Tangent: Makes me wonder why companies claim to be in the marketing business when they don't even have the ability to do something as simple as acknowledge an email enquiry.). 

Does anyone know of a good, Flash-based, hyperbolic U.I.? I am creating an application that aggregates tag-based information from a variety of sites and then allows exploration of tag clusters and would like to use such a U.I. I will post more details of the application soon.