WHAT ARE TAG CLOUDS ???

A tag cloud or word cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color.

Definition



A tag cloud is a set of related tags with corresponding weights. Typical tag clouds have between 30 and 150 tags. The weights are represented using font sizes or other visual clues. Tag clouds can represent many weights, though less accurately so. Also, frequently, tag clouds are interactive: tags are hyperlinks .

History

The first use of tag clouds on a high-profile website was on the photo sharing site Flickr, created by Flickr co-founder and interaction designer Stewart Butterfield.Tag clouds have also been popularized by Del.icio.us and Technorati, among others.

Types

There are three main types of tag cloud applications in social software, distinguished by their meaning rather than appearance.

In the first type, there is a tag cloud for each item whereas in the second type, we have global tag clouds where the frequencies are aggregated over all items and users. Size represents the number of times that tag has been applied to a single item. This is useful as a means of displaying metadata about an item that has been democratically 'voted' on and where precise results are not desired. A good example of this is Last.fm, which uses this method as a means of displaying the genre with which an artist or track has been tagged.

In the second, more commonly used type,size represents the number of items to which a tag has been applied, as a presentation of each tag's popularity. Examples of this type of tag cloud are used on the image-hosting service Flickr and the blog aggregator Technorati.

In the third type, tags are used as a categorization method for content items. Tags are represented in a cloud where larger tags represent the quantity of content items in that category.More generally, the same visual technique can be used to display non-tag data, as in a word cloud or a data cloud.

Data clouds

A data cloud is a data display which uses font size and/or color to indicate numerical values It is similar to a tag cloud but instead of word count, displays data such as population or stock market prices.

Text clouds

A text cloud or word cloud is a visualization of word frequency in a given text as a weighted list. The technique has recently been popularly used to visualize the topical content of political speeches.