Tag Clouds

Until recently, the word ‘cloud’ referred to fluffy or angry-looking formations in the sky. Now our information horizon holds a different kind of cloud that’s also worth learning about …. the Tag Cloud.

Tag Clouds are alphabetic lists of terms or keywords that visually represent web pages they point to. Each term in the tag cloud links to the web page(s) to which that same term was assigned. When you visit web sites that use tag clouds, heavily-used (popular) tags usually appear in larger, bolder font, so it is easy to quickly see the most popular topics. The tag cloud illustrated here is from Flickr, the photo management web site. Flickr was one of the first sites to use cloud tags. Some other popular sites that use tag clouds are:

• del.icio.us (bookmarks site)
• LibraryThing (communally-cataloged books)
• Technorati (bloggers site)

Why Tag?
In addition to using clouds to navigate around other sites, you can also use tag clouds to assign meaningful words of your own choosing to web pages. Your ever-growing list of words can be used multiple times, and you can also add or delete words at any time. So tags provide a meaningful way to ‘catalog’sites you want to organize and return to. This type of cataloging does not rely on controlled thesauri; you create your controlled list as you go along.

Tag clouds also have a “social networking” function. For instance, if you use the Flickr photo site, and assign the term “cat” to a photo, you can also visit the other 800,000+ photos that have used that same term!

Just How Popular is Tagging?
A recent Pew study (December 2006) found that 28% of U.S. Internet users have tagged materials such as photos, news stories or blog posts. They report further that on a typical day online, 7% of users use tags. Like everything else on the web, these percentages will likely increase by leaps and bounds. Stay tuned!