Tag Cloud

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[1], 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[2], among others.

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

External linksEdit

• del.icio.us - cloud of users' most popular words tagging web pages
• Technorati - most popular tags of blogs
• Flickr - most popular tags of photos
• zeitcode_doc - Archive of Jim Flanagan's Zeitgeist.pm module and documentation.

PapersEdit

• Improving Tag-Clouds as Visual Information Retrieval Interfaces