CMS Fridays: You Like Tags? How About A Complete Navigation Around It?

I’m not a big fan of tag clouds. Okay, I hate tag clouds, because I can never make them look good (I need some order in my life, okay?), but here’s an interesting concept that I saw come across my RSS Feed: a SharePoint site that is completely tag driven, built for the New Zealand Ministry of Transport.

This article walks through step-by-step how the Microsoft Partner Provoke created a series of custom lists so documents could be tagged by any number of categories across different groups. While there was a more controlled structure than a folksonomy (the IA’s were driving the bus), this is the ultimate flexible system.

The benefits are:

• Quick information architecture process — what would take months only took a few weeks
• Extensible information architecture structure — just add a new tag!
• Popular tags would bubble up organically, and be displayed on the home page

I’m guessing that the document library lives at the top level.

Ironically, they went with tag lists and filtering because tag could usability is still up in the air — hmmph!