RawSugar
I read a really interesting article on tags today, at the core of which was the concept of extending them beyond being displayed as a cloud. I happen to really like clouds, very basic and the important goodies are instantly recognizable. Obviously tags are valuable in organizing content, but as far as how you navigate through them there are very few options out there.
Enter RawSugar, a faceted method of displaying tags. The most basic way of describing faceted tags starts with the fundamental concept that most content will contain multiple tags. Clouds work great for content with one tag, but more than one tag and it falls apart. With faceted tags you can allow users to choose a “dive in” point for content (an initial tag), and then see the relationships between tags and sub tags.
On usermonkey you’ll find lots of items tagged as web+marketing, or web+design… now if I had tons of content I might have items with 5 or more tags. Using faceted tags you could drop in at web, then refine your search by selecting marketing, then culture, then politics, etc.
The cool thing about RawSugar is that they provide a free, instant service for adding a faceted tag search to your site. It doesn’t make sense here yet, because I just don’t have enough content or tags. However, if you’re running a blog (or any type of site off of the common blog offerings) you can easily sign up for a RawSugar account and add some simple code to add faceted tagging to your site. Nifty.