Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Tagnautica is a fun and interesting Flash user interface for exploring and navigating among tags, in this case on Flickr. After keying in an initial tag, related tags are displayed in a circle, with a sample image from each tag category displayed in a representative size.

When you move the cursor over a tag bubble, it temporarily becomes larger so you can get a look at it. The other bubbles keep resizing as well, giving the interface a very fluid appearance. When you find something you like, you can click on the Tagnautica bubble to view the tag page over at Flickr.

I always enjoy these sorts of user interfaces for semi-random exploration. I’ve noticed that I don’t really use any of the cool visualization tools when I actually want to find something, though. Not sure if that’s because they don’t represent a useful set of questions as implemented yet, or simply because my brain doesn’t work that way.

I find I experience these interfaces more as pleasant interactive art than as useful data navigation tools. One of these days I’m sure something is going to click, though.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 15th, 2006 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Search Engines, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.