The Wisdom of Clouds

I’m playing with a few thinks at the moment and one of those had me thinking of tag clouds. For those who dont spend time on flickr or similar you may not have seen then, or at least heard of the terminology. All we are really taking about here is a visually weighted list.

I dont agree with Jeffrey here unfortunately, who has issues. I can see the point, that sometimes information is better organised by one person than many (think your weekly food shopping list) but in some cases it can be nice – especially where it provides an alternative navigation method. Maybe I just missed the part where everyone had a tag cloud? I’d love to see, for instance, a tag cloud on last.fm of bands that I might like based on my listening habits, and those of a similar musical persuasion.

An interesting article on where next for tags clouds throws up a few interesting points but one thing I have not seen discussed at all is the accessibility angle. Visual prominence is one thing, but without some sort of semantic prominence those not viewing the content visually lose out. A very unscientific survery involving the del.icio.us tag cloud confirmed what I though would probably be the case – the visual effects (ie. bigger or highlighted text) are implemented purely via classes on the links.

What would be the effect of using plain links, moving to emphasis for the next level, up to strong for the really important tags? We can style the content exactly the same as before, but we have added some sematic prominence to the content.

Anyone had any experience implementing tag clouds in live projects? Even better, anyone had experience of user testing such interface devices? Real bonus points for accessibility related testing.