I noticed your question earlier :

“But I wonder if there was ways of enhancing a perma-navigatoin with some tagcloud thinking. Could a menu have differing font-sizes based on how often something was being used. Are there other design improvements one can think of that borrow from tag-clouds?”

Something like this was implemented in the UK some time ago by the BBC, though i’m not sure if it’s still the case. They had their front-page navigation split into panes by category, and categories that were clicked more often changed background colour.

So for example a pale beige background for the “Sport” section would gradually become a deeper brown or red over time, to indicate your preference for this category. It seems like a really good, and generally unobtrusive, way to indicate preferred choices.

difficult to use, navigate and generally figure out in six seconds. nope. It is not the wave of the future. I like much of what the new collaborative web is doing, but this is not it.

In this particular instance I don’t see the benefit, and I can see many potential drawbacks (negative feedback loops obscuring important menu items etc).

After reading the designer’s rather fuzzy comment I’ve settled on ‘riding the gravy train’ as primary motivation behind the design. But then again, I’ve never liked marketeers, and having them meddle with your UI design is not the smartest move in my book. Have them think up the pretty colors, or fonts, or something :P

I’m just experimenting with tags in my blogs (using Ultimate tag warrior with WordPress), and I’m moving away from the sized options. I quite like the idea of tagging, though currently getting in a muddle between tagging & categorising, which is another matter!

However, tags clouds as navigation – possibly on sites that focus just on current interest, but in general, no thanks!

I certainly hope they will disappear since they take too much space and mostly afflict damage to the usability.
So, is it the future? Let’s hope not.

I really like the idea of tag clouds in some respects. I like the serendipity that can occur when you happen upon a site and don’t really know what you might want to explore. It really can open up the content on a site quite beautifully. But, how often is this the case? Only occasionally, I’d wager.

Also, if you use tag clouds to facilitate this effect, then it only works to a certain scale. I was thinking about this when playing with the recently released GoogleCloud interface. When its capturing everyones search terms, its useless to me – when its just me and ‘likeminded people’ it is interesting and useful. So, context is important.

I have to agree with everyone who has said that a tag cloud doesn’t work as the sole navigational system… the only exception to this might be something like Flickr, which is largely serendipitous I guess (although, its also augmented by powerful tag searching functionality).