Tag clouds are young. The term folksonomy itself was coined just over a year ago by Thomas Vander Wal on the IA Institute’s Members’ Discussion List in a response to Gene Smith and has yet to be a word even a medium-sized minority has heard, much less come to understand.

However, here on Cloudalicio.us, we can already see that many items being tagged since the beginning of del.icio.us have stabilized. New tags being added to these URLs are no longer visibly affecting the overall weights as each tag’s marginal weight has decreased since the first tag was assigned.

We have a better view of what everyone “has thought” of an item by looking at it’s full, cumulative tag cloud, but we miss what everyone “is thinking” of an item when we allow ourselves to look back into time and see possibly “stale” tags from long ago intermingled with more contemporary, more recent tags.

This is not to say that tags from long ago are not valid or no longer important. They are. It’s just that if we’re going to be looking at tag clouds as tea leaves into what a population thinks about something, we need to recognize that unless we silence the voices from long ago, they’ll continue to speak to us and influence our counts. Opinion polls for presidential elections are considered old almost before they get to press. Yesterday’s numbers don’t mean anything. Having snapshots in time is what allows trending to be done.

Trending in tags, here on Cloudalicio.us and everywhere else, has been cumulative only. We do not yet have the tools to slice all this new data and make it more meaningful than to look at it in toto, in summary form.

And so, we need to define a tag cloud epoch.

Tag clouds should be viewed within a framework of five points in time.

1. system epoch
2. tag cloud epoch
3. zoom window start
4. zoom window end
5. now

As it currently stands, most systems that have tagging enabled count all the tags between the two outermost points in time (#1 and #5). Cloudalicio.us currently allows four of these to be defined (#1, #3, #4, #5) when used with Date Zooming. Unfortunately, there is no current way to define the point in time from which tags should start to be counted. The addition of point #2 is what will let us see any arbitrary slice in time. This will allow us to see what a population was thinking during a specific week or month about a specific item.

Hopefully, it will appear here soon…

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 20th, 2005 at 4:13 am and is filed under Thoughts.