In recent posts to The Daily Report such as Tag Clouds are the New Mullets and Remove Forebrain and Serve, Zeldman has blasted tag clouds because of their tendancy to make popular topics even more popular while making less popular topics disappear into obscurity. Tag clouds are lists of links to related topics that have become popular on sites like Flickr. In Flickr’s case, users create tags, or keywords, to describe their images; a tag’s popularity is measured by how many people use it to describe their photos. As a tag becomes popular its visual style on the page changes (often growing in size or boldness) or it receives a higher standing on site some other way, causing more people t use that tag and thereby causing a vicious cycle where the tag become even more popular. Less popular tags, by contrast, lose their popularity until they fall off the list, never to be heard from again. In theory unpopular topics become lost.

That got me thinking. What would happen if we highlighted the least popular topics and forgot about the rest? Theoretically this would cause unpopular topics to gain popularity, which would in turn drop them off the list. That would make room for new topics on the list, keeping it fresh, and as those became popular they’d fall off, allowing the previously popular but now unpopular topics to come back. Plus, popular topics should be more expected, so they’d be more likely to be the topic of searches or other retrieval methods, and wouldn’t be as likely to get lost.

Confused yet?