What Are Tag Clouds-Social bookmarking
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Tag Clouds are interesting in that it shows what words are most often used to describe content. But what if you have a similar piece of content, and you wish to tag it to get the most visibility? Tag clouds are a great way to illustrate links to areas of the website, offering users the ability to quickly see what links are most popular. Bolding, increased font size, and underlines are used to make the links visible to users for easy access. Tag clouds are ordered alphabetically or by size - it would be much more effective, if tags that belong together could also be presented together. Some of these relations can be deduced automatically, by observing how tags are used: Some tags might always appear together, others sometimes and others never.
Tag clouds take care of agility, timeliness and relevancy for you, since real people tag sites based on what’s in their mind at the time. And while your site may get tagged in some quirky ways, quirks are what make the human brain much less prone to manipulation than an algorithm. Tagging is used as a way to categorize related bookmarks. The tags are keywords that relate to the resource. Tags are cool - they let you organise what you bookmark in loose hierarchies. Collections are also useful as they provide an extra level of meaningful grouping.
Tag clouds are good for highlighting the topics that are most popular, so by definition tag clouds under represent those topics that are not popular. However, a list of 20-40 categories in the side navigation of a blog is unmanageable because you will probably have to scroll up and down to see all of the categories. Tag clouds are becoming increasingly popular with websites that utilize social tagging to categorize ever expanding collections of digital information. Tagging has been found to be more adaptable than traditional classification, as well as more prone to serendipitous information discovery. Tag clouds are one of those odd “geekisms” that coagulate from staring at too many blog posts. They are a rather cute way to try to add some “organic” qualities to an inorganic medium. Tag clouds are a pretty difficult design challenge if you ask me: how to make the data useful and “at a glance” meaningful, without dragging the whole page into a chaotic soup? Haven’t seen anyone who’s managed to solve this completely so far. Tag clouds are the stupidest creation on the web I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been on the web. I don’t use tag clouds — and I can’t imagine anyone that does. Tag clouds are one of the most widely adopted methods of displaying a list of categories or other content filters. This is great as they’re both accessible and a great enhancement to usability.
Tag clouds are commonly used on blogs where a loose “tagging” system is used to mark-up posts (rather than slipping them into a single category like I do on Seopher.com, they assign keywords to the post). The more posts that have a specific keyword; the bigger the word gets in the tag cloud. Tag clouds are generating a lot of online interest as well as discussion among the design community and this is mainly attributed to a new approach in their use. This approach revolves around community generated tagging but before we go into that, let’s discuss what they are and how they work. Tag clouds are visually-weighted renditions of collections of words (tags) that can be used to represent the concepts present in large collections of information. Tags may be assigned to information resources manually or by automatic indexing.
Tags: book > bookmarking > bookmarks > internet > Social Bookmarking > social computing > social internet > tag clouds > tagging > tags
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