And Just What ARE Those Darling Tag Clouds?

To the left is a screenshot of the tag clouds I created. If you take a look on the far right column of this blog, you'll see the tag clouds in their original size. They were created thanks to ZoomClouds. The way tag clouds work is the bigger the word in size, the more I've used it in my posts throughout this entire blog. It's a great search tool! I highly recommend creating tag clouds for your blog. I had the most fun designing my tag clouds. While taking The New New Media: Weblogs, Wikis, RSS and Emerging Social Media with Professor Robert Berkman this past summer semester, we were thoroughly surprised and enjoyed learning about this new tool being used on the Web 2.0 aka the Social Web. They are the next generation of meta tags that search engine optimizers used, but taken to a new and very visible level. I think they draw attention in all their colors. As a class, many of us thought they were the cleverest invention and pretty darling, too.

Definitions: Tag Clouds Further Explained

According to Wikipedia's entry a tag cloud is the following:

"A tag cloud (more traditionally known as a weighted list in the field of visual design) is 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.


The first widely known tag cloud appeared on Flickr, the photo sharing site. That implementation was based on Jim Flanagan's Search Referral Zeitgeist, a visualization of web site referrers. Tag clouds have also been popularised by Technorati, among others.


The first published appearance of a tag cloud can be attributed to the "subconcious files" in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs (1995)."

A great visual example of tag clouds can be seen on del.icio.us as shown on their site's screenshot below:


Del.icio.us defines tag clouds simply as:

"...a list of tags where size reflects popularity."

I would change their definition to:

"...a list of visual tags where size reflects popularity."

ZoomClouds offers an easy way to create tag clouds for your blog or Web site.


ZoomClouds defines tag clouds as follows:

"Tag clouds are cool, informative, appealing representations about what's happening in your blog, or anywhere else.

With ZoomClouds you can put in a matter of minutes a tag cloud in your site, based on whichever RSS feed you like."