When I first set my eyes on a simple, four-color tag cloud, or keyword cloud, I was instantly reminded of chalkboard sketches by frazzled linguistics professors. A particular lecture on the lexicon and its interaction with the brain’s priming effect comes to mind.
The theory, later confirmed by brainwave and eye movement studies, was that when a person hears a word, a slew of other concepts are primed. That is, particular related concepts are “made ready” for the brain to use.
For example, when one hears the word ‘clown,’ the brain will be able to process concepts like ‘circus,’ ‘magic,’ or ‘juggle’ faster because there is a strong priming effect on these words.
If you look at words that may also be primed by ‘clown’, you can start to see a second level of concepts that show weaker activity. You can also see a priming effect on ‘lion,’ ‘trapeze,’ and ‘tightrope’ through ‘circus.’ Or, there’s a second level effect on the concepts ‘David Copperfield,’ ‘trick,’ and ‘The Gathering,’ through the word ‘magic.’ And on and on.
This process is different for everyone and is only one of the ways our brain helps us sift through a massive amount of information. Tag clouds, however, have the potential to delivery a similar priming effect in order to sort through the ever-increasing amount of information on the Web.
To make the Web more intuitive, we need to look to language and the way in which words relate to and trigger entire concepts. To begin, let's make tag clouds that respond with a priming effect. A word entered into a search engine should return a result that not only encompasses related tags, but also represents the relative popularity and accuracy of these related tags.
The weight given to each related tag, based on the criteria above, will represent the priming effect, described above. This entry has gotten too long already, it will be concluded tomorrow.
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