The Business Directory search page within Tendenci contains a "tag cloud" listing that helps users visulalize the amount of content within a particular category. Often the value of "weighted text lists" is misunderstood as "a jumble of mixed-sized fonts". Instead the developers of Tendenci see the lists as an easy means of communicating the popularity of content.
Visualization is an important theme in Tendenci. The value of human communication and interaction is weaved through every part, including putting tag clouds on Business Directory listings to help communicate the value of the content.
For more on the theory behind tag clouds, I suggest reviewing these powerpoint slides by Rashmi Sinha. Rashmi put together some slides that help to explain the theories behind tag clouds. Here is also a link to Rashmi’s site: http://www.rashmisinha.com/.
For our particular directory we do not want to see the weighted font cloud. While I do understand your point, we are using our Directory module for several purposes and the weighted Categories make this confusing.
We fully expect our searches to be done by both Category and location, as we are an International group with members from all over the place. Plus, our categories are very broad – it is the Sub-Categories that tell the story, so having the Category weighted is misleading.
For example, people using our directory will be searching for things like – “camera operators in CA” – where camera operators is a Sub Category under Production Services.
We do not need to see that there are lots of things listed in Production Services, because we are going to go there anyway.
The “list” view offers much more information – Categories with the Sub-Categories listed underneath in nice neat even fonts. Once a particular category or sub category is selected, then you get to the search page anyway where you can do a more detailed search by City or State (I’d like to be able to add another field for region – or in our case Chapter, as City is too narrow and State is too broad).