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What is a tag cloud?

A tag cloud is a weighted list of words used on a website. The font size of the tags vary from largest (most frequently used tags) to smallest (least frequently used tags). Tags can be arranged in any order but they are generally arranged alphabetically. They aid in navigation and clicking a tag in the tag cloud will lead in general to a collection of items or information associated with that tag e.g:

(A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2.0, Source: Wikipedia)

 What are the uses for a tag cloud?

• As a visualization tool for most important words/phrases on a website
• As navigation menu
• As search terms

What tools are available to create a tag cloud?

• ZoomClouds: create a tag cloud using any RSS feed. Using a small snippet code embed the cloud on any web page (e.g. TechCrunch tag cloud). It has its API using which you can have better control over the cloud you create and also build powerful mashups.
• Tagline Generator: a simple PHP codebase that lets you generate chronological tag clouds from simple text data sources (e.g: US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud)
• TagCrowd: web-based tag cloud generator. Manually enter text or upload a text file to create a tag cloud.
• IBM Many Eyes: The Many Eyes tag cloud can show one of two kinds of data: free text, or a two-column table of tags and numbers.
• ToCloud: It has a page to cloud tool which takes a URL and creates a tag cloud from it. I tried one for technacular which can be found here.
• ZoomTags: you can put small (or large) tag clouds on your web page and earn revenue from your web site
• Cloud Control for ASP.NET
• Ultimate Tag Warrior 3: for Wordpress

Some interesting tag clouds

• U.S. presidential speeches as tag clouds
• Tag clouds for Oreilly Books
• Tag cloud of words and phrases most frequently searched by NYTimes.com readers
• Microsoft at CES: The view from the tag cloud
• Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell: Keynote Tag Clouds
• Quintura: cloud based search engine

Tag clouds have gained momentum with the Web 2.0 sites and are effective means of data visualization.

(Via)

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