Read this Post because it has Zeldman in the Title
In his clever but poorly-named article Remove Forebrain and Serve, Jeffrey Zeldman knocks down and kicks tag clouds, those faddish interfaces created from the aggregate behavior of users that have garnered attention on sites like Del.icio.us and Flickr. Zeldman makes the argument that tag clouds are like mullets, cool for a second because someone was drunk but not worth a second look.
I agree with Zeldman on that point: tag clouds aren’t very useful. They’re a snapshot of the most popular words on the web site, given visual weight to signify as such, but aren’t helpful as navigation tools. Fortunately for us, but seemingly unbeknownst to Zeldman, those sites don’t rely on tag clouds for their primary navigation.
After Zeldman dutifully puts tag clouds into the trash heap, he then turns his attention to all popularity-based systems. He says:
“Popularity sometimes promotes quality but it is often a finder of mindlessness: extreme leftist or rightist rants, passed-out co-ed photos, embarrassing videos of people who can’t dance trying to dance and people who can’t sing trying to sing.”
Zeldman’s examples are certainly embarassing reminders of systems gone wrong, but who exactly have they gone wrong for? Have they gone wrong for people who have made the thing popular…who find entertainment in such things? No, they’re delighted. Have they gone wrong for those of us who take a gander but simply aren’t interested? No, we simply move on. Have they gone wrong for the person who passed out before becoming photogenic? Perhaps, but they’ve got bigger problems. Zeldman’s point, I think, is that they’ve gone wrong for another, silent party, the party whose content could be receiving our attention instead of content involving the poor co-ed.
This is an amazingly difficult argument to make, simply because it’s going against the rules of the game of humans which state that we use popularity as a proxy for good judgment. It’s just the way we are. To ignore it would be to ignore the behavior of the human race. Even so, in most cases things that are popular are of good quality. There will be nasty exceptions, of course, but those are easy to see (or easy to forget) because they don’t stay popular for long. We can’t dismiss the rules of the game simply because they conceptually lead to a few dead ends. And, in cases like re-electing a President, we sometimes have to admit that a bigger segment of the population simply sees things differently than we do.
Zeldman’s response to popularity is the thinking-man’s response. It’s the response that life shouldn’t work that way because it’s not right. Instead, the people writing the quiet but quality content should get recognition and attention that they deserve. Yeah, and I should have been more popular in high school…tough luck, Joe.
The ironic thing is that Zeldman is a product of the very systems of popularity that he’s complaining about. Even some of the comments left on his site demonstrate that. One person had this to say:
“I found this article through Furl. At the time I saw it, only one person had ‘furled it,’ so there were no motivations based on popularity for me to click on the link. There was, however, the word ‘Zeldman’ in the link text and that is what got me to come take a look. I have, in a manner of speaking, a personal, internal flag for the word, one based on my experience with reading other things you’ve written, Jeffrey.”
The same situation happened to me. I’ve had Zeldman’s blog in my feed reader for a year now, and I happened to catch his posting within 10 minutes of his putting it live. I went to read it not because the article was popular, but because Jeffrey’s always got something interesting to say. That’s why he’s been so popular for so long. Subsequent people may be reading it, however, because now it is popular. If this is the case then the system seems to be working correctly because it was a thought-provoking and well-written post.
Well, I say thought-provoking and well-written only on the assumption that I still have my forebrain.
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Comments
1. Nick Gould 11:18am, Fri 6th, 2005
I was about to reference Zeldman’s post in a comment to your DW article when I noticed that you had weighed-in already. I think you are right to point out that Zeldman’s post is a screed against the tyranny of popularity in general (hence the title of his initial post on the subject). But, as usual, the argument is rapidly polarizing to the point where the debate doesn’t reveal anything productive anymore. I agree with Zeldman’s visceral reaction against the “faddishness” (your word) of tag clouds. I also agree that popularity, while it can be an effective shortcut in some cases, can never replace navigation that helps me find the specific thing I want when I want it. Can you imagine trying to find a low-fat chicken recipe in an ever-changing recipe tag cloud? Perhaps, having located a broad subset of choices, a tag cloud could help me to narrow my choices further. But is this so different from user-generated ratings or automated popularity ranking engines such as Clickability?
What I keep missing in this discussion is the role that user needs and objectives play in the assessment of whether a navigational approach is “good” or “bad.” Can there ever be such an assessment that does not correlate to the purpose of the thing in the first place? Maybe I’m missing something but this all seems like much-ado about nothing. Tag clouds are neat and new, and a good addition to the design vernacular, but I’m not sure they (yet) deserve quite this intensity of debate. In our rush to celebrate something innovative and fresh, why do we always feel the need to discard half of what had been working fine in the first place? I appreciate Zeldman’s post if only because it applies a brake to this tendency.
And, by the way, I thought your DW article was great. Really thought-provoking and balanced.
2. Peter J.Lambert 11:32am, Fri 6th, 2005
Hmmm. I thought Zeldman’s post was a little short sighted and it seemed to me that he was just venting a personal dislike of the tag-cloud idea and related systems without having really tried to use them.
I, like you, don’t think that tag-clouds are particularly useful as a primary method of navigation. In fact, I can’t think of a single situation where using them as the sole navigation system would be a good idea. They are, however and interesting aside. I could use the navigation to try and find something interesting, or I could use the tag-cloud to see what other people think I should be looking at. I might come up trumps and I might not. Depending on the context of the site I’m browsing, that might not matter.
As far as popularity goes, and you can quote me on this, what’s popular is not always right or good, but it will always be popular, until it’s not popular anymore.
There. That made sense, didn’t it?
3. Gene 3:24pm, Fri 6th, 2005
Actually, I think Zeldman makes a good point, though it’s not really about tag clouds. Links in a directed network (i.e. the web) are inherently unfair–they follow a rich-get-richer pattern. (It remains to be seen if that’s true of tagging, though Zeldman does mention the self-reinforcing nature of the tag cloud.)
Popularity is not some in-built characteristic–it accretes, and that’s the interesting part. Things become popular and then fall out of favour, largely because of influential people writing about them.
And we measure influence on the web through links.
So if you ask me, we can’t simply write off popularity by saying it’s the “rules of game” or “human nature,” or rationalize it by asserting that popularity approximates quality (which it doesn’t, IMO). We have to at least understand how popularity-based systems work and when complementary ones are needed. And I think Zeldman did a good job of raising those issues.
4. Josh 8:16am, Sat 7th, 2005
Gene, I’m not trying to write off popularity. On the contrary, I’m asking: “what does popularity mean?”. Well, one way to look at it is that it does approximate quality…or at least that’s how humans use it.
For example, look at the most popular writers of all time. Aren’t they the best ones, too? Aren’t the most popular web sites also of high quality? Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay, etc. For the most part? I think that if we look at popularity over the long term, at some point we have to realize that things are popular for a reason. It’s not just because of a short-term network effect. By the way, Zeldman’s example of Kottke linking to something should not be thrown away. Kottke has so much attention that if he does link to something that it does mean something different than if someone else links to it, for better or worse.
All popularity means is that people are paying attention to something. I feel like Zeldman and several folks who commented were focusing on the negative “high school popularity” connotation, but that isn’t the only interpretation. Because of that connotation, we all lean toward shunning anything popular, but that seems unreasonable to me. Indeed, our actions everyday are contrary to that.
5. Gene 1:38pm, Sun 8th, 2005
Look at the most popular writers of all time. Aren’t they the best ones, too?
Apparently Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls and Mao’s Red Book are two of the most popular books of all time. Shrek 2 is one of the top grossing movies of all time.
I’m not saying popularity isn’t useful, but on its own it’s a pretty crude instrument (as the above examples show).
I think that if we look at popularity over the long term, at some point we have to realize that things are popular for a reason.
I agree… and the reason is marketing.
Seriously though, I think you discount the impacts of influence, marketing and herd behaviour and overvalue quality as a determinant of popularity.
It’s not just because of a short-term network effect.
The linking patterns I’m talking about aren’t short term… they’re very much part of the nature of the web. (Linked has a good description of this feature, btw.)
6. Josh 9:00pm, Sun 8th, 2005
Gene, I think this is a very interesting discussion. What I want to know is: at what point can we tell the difference between influence, herd mentality, marketing, and quality?
If someone reads a Roger Ebert review (the most popular movie reviewer in the US) and then goes to see a movie because of it, what is that? Is that herd mentality, or is it Ebert giving a recommendation for a quality movie?
Let’s assume for a second that it is herd mentality. Does that mean that every action pre-empted by another’s suggestion is herd-mentality? Or only uninformed actions? What then is an uninformed action?
And what of influence? Frankly, I’m amazingly influenced in the movies that I see. I’m influenced heavily by my friends, ratings sites like rottentomatoes and imdb, as well as previews that I see. If I was not influenced by something I wouldn’t know anything about what movies are coming up….how else would I find out about things?
So, popularity is a metric of many things. We agree on that. My claim (heavily influenced by your sound reasoning) is that in the short-term, it is influenced as much by marketing, herd-mentality, and influence as by quality. In the long term, I maintain, we approach a truer metric of quality…and so the Great Gatsby still reigns as one of the most popular books of our day…and Good eventually triumphs over Evil.
7. bill h-d 8:46am, Mon 9th, 2005
I think one of the important distinctions here is the difference between “becoming popular” and “staying popular.” That former, in an age of media saturation, can be done without a shred of quality if other sensational factors are in place. But it remains to be seen how much our marketing-intensive environment can create lasting popularity sans quality.
8. Josh 9:09am, Mon 9th, 2005
Yes, Bill, that seems to be the distinction we (or at least I) were moving toward…thanks for the insight.