Tag cloud

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Definition

“A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag”(Wikipedia, retrieved 13:13, 14 September 2006 (MEST))

Here is a practical explanation from Communicopia (retrieved 13:13, 14 September 2006 (MEST) and slightly shortened):

A tag cloud shows you all the tags we are using on this site. Tags are a new style of search data that describe what each page or story on the site is about. The tag cloud is therefore a visual map of the content on a site. Tags that are large and bold are written about a lot, tags that are smaller have only been written about a few times.

Tags are a new form of information design pioneered by the most successful online communities. They offer another way to navigate content on a site, showing patterns, the scope of content available, and how popular different keywords are.

Some sites allow you to tag content with your own words, helping you organize and remember content that is relevant to you. And by sharing your tags with others, an evolutionary "wisdom of crowds" map is created, helping you and others find valuable signals within all the noise.

See tagging (or folksomy) for a global discussion of tagging as opposed to use metadata taxonomies à la Dublin Core.

Methodes and application areas

According to the Wikipedia article [1], there are to methods for producting a tag cloud:

The number of times that tag has been applied to a single item. Therefore, a tag becomes bigger when more people decide to apply it to a single item.

The number of items that have been given that tag. Therefore, more popular tags become bigger.

At the time of writing this, there is still a lot of discussion on how to optimize computing of tag clouds and visualization methods. See Hassan-Monteroa and Herrero-Solan (2006) for discussion and a proposal.

Links

Wikipedia: Tag cloud

Examples of webservices with tag clouds

del.icio.us - cloud of users' most popular words tagging web pages
Technorati - most popular tags of blogs
Flickr - most popular tags of photos
Furl

Most of the better blog engines allow (optionally) to generate and display a tag cloud.

Examples of tag clouds from the world of education

References

Yusef Hassan-Monteroa Víctor Herrero-Solana (2006), Improving Tag-Clouds as Visual Information Retrieval Interfaces, International Conference on Multidisciplinary Information Sciences and Technologies, InSciT2006. Mérida, Spain. October 25-28, 2006. PDF Preprint

Brooks, C. H. and Montanez, N. 2006. Improved annotation of the blogosphere via autotagging and hierarchical clustering. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on World Wide Web (Edinburgh, Scotland, May 23 - 26, 2006). WWW '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 625-632. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1135777.1135869. Abstract/HTML/PDF