Hello Nicole, I'm involved with an online video project called the global oneness project and we use tags (we call them keywords) as a pretty visible way of navigating the site.
When we initially started the site, we ran into the same issues and questions that you have. My primary concern was to create a site that was scalable (Started with a dozen videos but now have hundreds), took advantage of the growing use of tags, but still didn't alienate our presumed large audience of non technical users. So what I came up with was a global navigation that consists of a basic hierarchical navigation that breaks down videos into our two subcategories of short films and interviews and an area called "explore" that uses tags to filter content by keywords and categories. We also surface related tags on the individual video pages and compliment that with "related videos" I don't have any hard data on the success rates of each piece of navigation but what I have noticed during the past year is that the users who "explore" by category or keywords spend way more time on the site and seem to have a deeper experience. Oh... one last thing. All of our content is self produced so our tags are editorial and are not generated by users. Feel free to contact me with any additional specific video site questions. Happy to help. Shawn Visual Designer http://www.globalonenessproject.org . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=40972 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
