• Reported by Nate

I was fascinated by this page describing a Noguchi Filing System (via Todd). It's interesting because getting the most out of it is almost unavoidable. Through use it naturally evolves into something more and more convenient. Read the linked page for more details, but the 5 second summary is: don't group files together, instead, package them, label them, and put on a shelf. Move files to the left side of the shelf after use. Repeat, repeat, repeat - eventually your shelf contains most frequently needed documents on the left. It's a frequency-of-use sorting system.

Might this not be a nice implementation for tag based navigation? Rather than the visually weighted and alphabetically sorted tag cloud, how about a list of tags in order of "most clicked". Or actually do the sorting every time you click an item - although that might need to be limited to individual users.

I think a nice implementation of this might show an alphabetical listing, then upon clicking an item, an "alias" of the item is entered into a separate area above the alphabetical list. The alias area would work Noguchi style, shifting the most recently clicked item up top, but the alpha list would remain below. In my illustration here, the Noguchi area has a dark red background, it would constantly shift to show the most recently clicked item up top (probably most recent that *you clicked* only). Perhaps it would be limited to a certain number of links so that infrequently clicked links would not persist.

So anyway I thought I'd share this since it's been floating in my brain and I unfortunately don't have the time to pursue it, but maybe someone else does. Or maybe this is completely unintelligible, I can't yet tell.