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July 7, 2004
extisp.icio.us: mapping user tags
Posted by Clay Shirky
Behold extisp.icio.us, a 2D display mapping of del.icio.us tags per user, with font size and position indicating relative importance (here is a display mapping of Seb’s tags.)
Though del.icio.us is social software, extisp.icio.us isn’t yet. #1 on my request list is to see concatenated users — http://kevan.org/extispicious.cgi?name=sebpaquet+cshirky. #2 is to see the inverse mapping — select a tag and see the users arranged in the same manner — http://kevan.org/extispicious.cgi?tag=socialsoftware. (And #3 is a RESTian interface: http://kevan.org/extispicious/name/sebpaquet)
Comments (3)
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1. dreww on July 8, 2004 4:18 PM writes...
yeah, that looks pretty cool. for like 10 seconds. until you realize that it's just randomly distributing the tags across the viewpane, with no discernable clustering, and thus, hardly any value.
it's not even really a visualization. wow, my popular ones are bigger.
i'm sure joshua enjoyed the spider-rape.
Permalink to Comment2. joshua on July 8, 2004 4:19 PM writes...
So far as I can tell, it's just size based on count and random placement.
Thus it is not a mapping at all, just a dramatic and arty way to order the tags by frequency.
I wish people would tell me when they come up with stuff like this; I very nearly simply blocked the spider.
Permalink to Comment3. Clay Shirky on July 9, 2004 7:12 AM writes...
_yeah, that looks pretty cool. for like 10 seconds. until you realize that it’s just randomly distributing the tags across the viewpane, with no discernable clustering, and thus, hardly any value._
I'm inclined to agree with you -- the amount of information in the display pane is actually less than a histogram of the same data would be. Indeed, Joshua has pointed out that its a display but not a mapping, and I've changed the article text accordingly.
However, despite my inclination to agree with you, I don't. Value is as value does, and with over a hundred people having put extisp.icio.us in their del.icio.us links, that's a pretty wide vote for the site having something going for it.
Here's a theory about why it's gotten the popular vote:
1. It's pretty. It's easy to downgrade that, but the reason we even have a word in the language like 'pretty', and the reason it means something different than 'informative', is that we value things that create positive emotional, not just intellectual reactions.
2. It's ego-centered. I'm certain that the #1 use of extisp is del.icio.us users looking at their own tags, and the #2 use is looking at their friends' tags. I looked at Lawley's tags, and seeing them on a page like that gave me a Liz-gestalt that I wouldn't know about watching her del.icio.us feed.
The old PlumbDesign Visual Thesaurus was also pretty, but it wasn't pretty and ego-centered, so no one ever went back.
3. It's informative. It gives you a sense of the relative importance of tags for the user being looked for. Now, as I noted above, it's less informative than a histogram of the same data would be but it's more informative than what the users have access to today. The information presented is in the del database, but nowhere accessible in this aggregated form.
4. It's inspirational. When I saw this, I immediately wanted three things: for tag position to mean something, for the system to support the inverse user/tag mapping, and for it to support joins, as in "Show me clay+liz+seb's tags." I'm assuming that some percentage of the estisp users will have the same thoughts, and the LazyWeb will crank out a better version, in the same way extisp was a big improvement over Matt Jones' original mockup.
Permalink to CommentSo it won't win awards from Tufte or Nielsen, but it does something that no other tool does, has attracted considerable interest from users, and it is immediately obvious how to make it better. That's enough in my book to justify being pointed to here.