Relative Tag Text Sizes

March 18, 2007 12:25 PM

These days mefi tags all look about the same size (Opera 9.x, OS X). Is tweaking the math easy enough that the tag sizing could once again be a useful indicator of relative popularity? If not, no biggie.
posted by five fresh fish to Feature Requests at 12:25 PM (26 comments total)

(OTOH, maybe this should be an email? I can't imagine there's much to discuss.)
posted by five fresh fish at 12:26 PM on March 18, 2007

They look different sizes to me? (Firefox 1.5, OS X)
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:34 PM on March 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

They do look about the same size (Firefox 1.5, Windows XP).

I too think there should be a bigger difference in size relative to the tag's popularity. Maybe a bit more space between them?
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 12:42 PM on March 18, 2007

There are different sizes, but the majority are about the same size. (Looking at the source code for the page shows a lot of size 30.)
posted by niles at 12:47 PM on March 18, 2007

Looks like about three different sizes to me (maybe four?), on Camino, Shiira, and Opera on OSX. I agree that it was more interesting when the size-differences were more dramatic.
posted by interrobang at 12:49 PM on March 18, 2007

At least sex is still more popular than torture, thank God.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:09 PM on March 18, 2007 [2 favorites]

That's only because of metafilter's homolefty bias, Blazecock.
posted by interrobang at 1:16 PM on March 18, 2007

What a strange coincidence, "homolefty" is my safe word.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:19 PM on March 18, 2007 [2 favorites]

Mine is "Linnwood".
posted by interrobang at 1:21 PM on March 18, 2007

I just tried OmniWeb, Camino, Shiira, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. All have displayed the tags page with two different sizes, just as the fish describes.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 1:25 PM on March 18, 2007

Mine is "don't stop".
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 1:27 PM on March 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

It's even worse in w3m.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:32 PM on March 18, 2007

I say "Argh, my eyes!"
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:33 PM on March 18, 2007

*cough* You people use a safe word?
posted by DMan at 1:36 PM on March 18, 2007

My safeword is "Todd Lokken."
posted by grouse at 1:37 PM on March 18, 2007

Also, the AskMe tags page uses my "body font" selection for tags and the MeFi tags page uses my "smaller font" selection. Are they supposed to be different?
posted by stopgap at 1:46 PM on March 18, 2007

"At least sex is still more popular than torture, thank God.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:09 PM on March 18 [+]
[!]


That's only because of metafilter's homolefty bias, Blazecock.
posted by interrobang at 4:16 PM on March 18 [+]
[!]


What a strange coincidence, "homolefty" is my safe word.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:19 PM on March 18 [1 favorite +]
[!]


Mine is "Linnwood".
posted by interrobang at 4:21 PM on March 18 [+]
[!] "

That was a fantastic exchange, hermetic and hilarious all at once.
posted by klangklangston at 2:12 PM on March 18, 2007

I'll change the math on it. Now that we have hundreds of posts about each thing, the sizes are too big and not showing any differences.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:09 PM on March 18, 2007

Is this the new math that I've been hearing about?
posted by niles at 4:34 PM on March 18, 2007

Blazecock Pileon: "At least sex is still more popular than torture, thank God."

Makes sense to me, considering one is just a subset of the other.
posted by Plutor at 4:41 PM on March 18, 2007

My afternoon has been quite torturous, thankyouforasking. Now MYOB.
posted by five fresh fish at 5:34 PM on March 18, 2007

BTW, what math would work best? I suspect there isn't a linear correlation between font sizes and visual interpretation of change, ie. twice the font size != twice the value. Small changes in small fonts present a greater visual difference than small changes in large fonts.

One would probably be best off hand-tweaking a correlation table. Might be fun to do it through mass random polling.
posted by five fresh fish at 5:37 PM on March 18, 2007

I just changed the math on it so that it cut everything down in half. Six months from now, I'll probably have to do it again.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:36 PM on March 18, 2007

Seems like it was probably a clipping problem. As more tags are used in total, more of them will "clip" to the largest possible size.

Oddly enough my safe word is "Blazecock Pileon"
posted by delmoi at 10:00 PM on March 18, 2007

Hella, yah, that is perfect, Matt.

There must be a mathematical function which would automagically select the correct font size. Linear ratio, S-curve, bell curve, something like that.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:08 PM on March 18, 2007

Looking at that list, it'd be good to automagically replace plurals with singluar, combining their link and score. It might also be useful to look for opportunities to do a thesaurus-based set of replacements.

It's occurred to me previously that tagging could be powerfully extended by allowing a colon, comma, semicolon approach to listing:

picture,photography,photo;nature,cute,animalbabies; artist:BørñBjørñséñsøñ;style,format,genre:modern,monochrome,kitsch

etc. That's a lousy example, but you get the idea: semicolons separating tag-units of information; colons demarking the value for a tag; commas separating equivalent variants for the tag label and/or tag value.

All optional. Just provides a fairly natural UI to a finer degree of tagging.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:18 PM on March 18, 2007