Today Bamboo is releasing a beta version of a new Tag Cloud Web Part to Bamboo Labs. You can download the new Web Part for free and try it out in your SharePoint deployment. Over the next few weeks we'll be adding features and refining the new product. We need to hear from you want you want in a Tag Cloud Web Part from Bamboo.
What's a Tag Cloud?
I'm pretty sure that the first tag cloud I ever saw was on Flickr. I remember being fairly blown away. I think like many people, I wondered why it had taken mankind so long to develop such a powerful, and yet obvious and intuitive piece of UI. I believe tag clouds have gone on to be one of the most recognizable symbols of the social computing revolution. Stick a tag cloud on your site, and you've definitely gone Web 2.0
In case tag clouds are new to you, here are the basics. A tag cloud is merely a collection of terms, typically used as "tags" or "keywords". These terms are represented graphically. Font sizes are increased for popular tags and decreased for less popular tags. A tag cloud is a "heat map" for keywords, enabling users at a glance to scan a list of terms and derive a sense of what's hot and what's not. Here's the classic example from Flickr:
This tag cloud represents the all time most popular tags associated with photos uploaded to Flickr. From this simple display, you can imply statements like "wedding photos are more popular than baby pictures" or "dog pictures are more popular than cat pictures". Ok, that's the end of tag clouds 101, if you're still not clear, I would recommend the Wikipedia article on tag clouds.
What are Tag Clouds Good For?
I think this is an important question. Like many pieces of good UI, I believe tag clouds quickly became over implemented and over used. Designers and information architects love them because "they're cool", and with the right font scaling you can fit a tag cloud anywhere, filling up otherwise empty space on a Web page. With a little bit of common sense, I think we can use tag clouds more judiciously, and not just as irrelevant eye candy.
- Tag clouds are good for discovery in an unbounded set of results. My primary point here is that tag clouds are a great way to depict a large and unpredictable set of tags, terms and topics. However tag clouds are much less suitable when your universe of possible tags is small or finite. If you're dealing with just 10-20 possible tags, do your users a favor and stick with a frequency distribution, histogram or ranked list of categories.
- Tag clouds should almost always be used as supporting or redundant navigation. Whenever possible I would recommend providing users with a logical, hierarchical browsing structure first, and adding a tag cloud to increase discovery second. In my mind this makes tag clouds a great addition to SharePoint. SharePoint is great at providing highly structured vertical pathing to resources. Adding tag clouds to SharePoint increases discoverability and helps address the chronic problem of finding all of the useful content that gets neatly filed away in your portal.
- Tag clouds work best on highly dynamic data sets. Tag clouds are most interesting when they change regularly and give us a sense of "what's hot today". I think an AJAX enabled tag cloud that updates on the fly would be incredibly cool. In general, just keep in mind that when tag clouds become stale and static, people stop looking at them.
What Does the New Beta Version of the Bamboo Tag Cloud Web Part Do?
Please stop and make sure you understand the limited feature set of the beta version product before you go any further. There are plenty of good uses cases for the functionality offered, and you can have some fun with this, but I think it's important to manage expectations up front.
With this first version, you can create a tag cloud -- based on tags YOU set up. The tags reflected in this display aren't coming from your users, or from content (e.g. lists or libraries) associated with the Web Part. You will need to manually enter all of the tags that appear in your tag cloud.
Ok, you may ask... what good is that?
Here's an example of what you could do that would be useful. Let's say that you have a list or library that contains documents or articles related to all of the products offered by your company. Let's further say that you would like to get a sense of which products are the most popular with your users based on how often they navigate to the supporting documentation. With this version of the Bamboo Tag Cloud Web Part you could create a tag cloud using the names of your products. As users click through these tags to the associated documents, the tag cloud will begin to reflect relative interest in the various products by incrementing the font size of the most popular tags.
This may be exactly the functionality you are seeking, but wasn't what I expected when I first heard about the new product. I was imagining a Web Part that you drop on a list, document libary, wiki or other content archive that indexes metadata or generates word counts from a full text search and displays a dynamic tag cloud based on the content of the list. Personally, that's the direction I would like to see this product take. However, your input is more important than mine. Please visit the Bamboo Tag Cloud Web Part forum and tell us exactly what functionality you would like to see in the next versions.
Installing the New Beta Version of the Bamboo Tag Cloud Web Part
Ok, now that you know what you can do with the Bamboo Tag Cloud Web Part, let's walk through the process of installing and configuring it.
- Download the self-extracting EXE file from Bamboo Labs. Running the EXE will launch the Bamboo installer. Install the Web Part to your SharePoint server.
- Add the Web Part to a page. In my case, I created a new Web Part page just for this purpose:
The installer will automatically extract and create sub folders wherever you run it. In general, once the product has been successfully installed, you won't have much use for the contents of those folders unless you need to remove or repair the Web Part. However in the case of Bamboo Tag Cloud Web Part, we've included a list template with sample data in the "misc" folder. You'll want to grab the file called Bamboo Tag Cloud.stp to follow along with the use case described below.
Before you configure the Web Part, it will just look something like this:
- Now it's time to go back and import that list template that we found in the "misc" folder during installation. Navigate to the top of your site collection, and from the Site Settings page select List Templates under the Galleries section:
Import the file "Bamboo Tag Cloud.stp" This file contains sample data that will help us quickly populate an instance of the Bamboo Tag Cloud.
- Next, go back to the site where you have installed the new Web Part and create a new list based on the List Template we just imported. It doesn't matter what you call it, we'll connect the Web Part to this list when we do the final configuration. I called mine Tag Cloud Configuration List, just so I'll remember what it is next time I see it.
Once created, you'll see a list that looks like this:
- Almost there. Now, go back to the instance of the Bamboo Tag Cloud Web Part that you created, and click on "Modify Shared Web Part". It's time to plug in some data. Identify the site where your configuration list lives and then select that list. Click "Ok", and the next thing you should see is your own little SharePoint Tag Cloud! Congratulations! Click on any of the tags in the cloud, and you will see a collection of links related to that term.
Ok. Now how do you go about using this Web Part with your own data? To avoid confusion, you may want to go ahead and delete the pre-populated list we created with the imported list template.
When an existing list has not been specified as the data source, the Bamboo Tag Cloud Web Part automatically creates a list called Bamboo Tag Cloud. This list is created not when the Web Part is added to a page, but only after you've opened the tool pane of the Web Part and confirmed the location of the site where the list should reside. Once you've done this, you'll notice that the unpopulated state of the Web Part includes a link prompting you to add your first tag to the cloud.
NOTE: The list created by the Web Part is "special", which is to say that you can't just create your own custom list associate it with the Web Part. Make sure you use either the automatically created list or a new list based on the list template supplied.
Populating the list is very straightforward. There are only two columns that require entries, the name of the tag and a list of related URLs. Note that you can enter multiple related URLs, simply separate them with semi-colons.
What's next? Really it's time to sit back and let the power of social computing go to work for you. As your users navigate through the new tag cloud their clicks on the related URLs will begin to shape the cloud. Other than keeping your list of tags up-to-date, there is no maintenance required.
Finally, keep in mind that a number of fun effects are supported for the Bamboo Tag Cloud. Try out the "Fade", "Sequence" or "Movie" effects to give your tag cloud some extra zing.
And so begins the Recursive Development Process for Bamboo's new Tag Cloud Web Part. Now that version one is in your hands, we eagerly await your feedback and suggestions as we plan the next release. Please take a moment to visit the Tag Cloud Web Part forum and tell us what you want from a SharePoint tag cloud.
Posted
Apr 15 2009, 05:58 PM
by
Steve Gaitten
My name is Steve Gaitten, I am Director of Online Operations at Bamboo. My primary mission is to make Bamboo Nation the most useful SharePoint community site on the web. I am also focused on ensuring a world class shopping experience for customers who visit the Bamboo Solutions Online Store. Prior to Bamboo, I spent over a decade at America Online. At AOL my most recent roles included Director of Product Management in the Messaging & Social Media division as well as Managing Editor of AOL Money & Finance. I am a patented inventor, a bad golfer, an enthusiastic horticulturalist and a dog lover.