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Do you use Tag Clouds?

Some people may not like Tag Clouds, I personally find them interesting, useful and aesthetically appealing even if they are not precis information. They can have different useful purposes, ma.golia for example uses it when adding a bookmark which I find a good idea as the most used ones are quickly accessible and as for the other tags, well I search though all the small ones ignoring the big ones.

But it may appear as lacking size contrast, that's the problem with most if them.

Now that companies, schools, specially libraries, have started using social bookmarking systems there will be a lot of clouds to style. It's started, soon I'll be styling one. So I've been in quest and peeping around. I remember seeing nice ones in blogs but when searching specifically for them... guess what?
Ha! I can't find them! :>
So if you happen to have created an original tag cloud, please leave a comment and the URL.

I had thought all services using tags had a global cloud for most active or most used tags, like at del.icio.us or Connotea... I even thought they all had a special page just for that. In fact most of them only have user tag clouds if not at all. So from today, I decided to bookmark the interesting ones using the tags 'tag + cloud'. (and not 'tagcloud' in one word, unless it already been created by others, I'm not for making my tag list too long. Also when searching, would you type 'tag cloud' or tagcloud?)

Here are some keyword clouds I've crossed when searching.
(hover over the images to see where they come from and click on them to go there.):

Also ZoomTags has some different color examples.

Now what can we notice here? They are all in alphabetical order, not by size.
But which looks the best?
The web 2.0 mind cloud (6th thumbnail) and BlinkList's(1st thumbnail) looks best to me. The tag sizes have a lot of contrast and use several colors.

For the tag sizes the more the calculations curve is stronger the more tag size contrast. In a graph it would look something like this, where the red line represents more size contrast:

You can clearly understand this using del.icio.us tag roll generator. The less space between the smallest and biggest tag size the more boring. (here's BlinkList's, I'm not sure you can see it if your not registered.)

As for BlinkList's colors, if you peep in to the source code you will see that each letter is a different color (text generated using Rainbow Words).
An other nice way they use them is like if it represented the users thoughts:

It shows what the user have been bookmarking recently, in what field of keywords his thoughts are.

Connotea's (2nd thumbnail) color use is nice too, it goes from bright red thought faded colors to blue. The redder the tags the more active, the bigger text the most used. Today was an 'avian flue' tag day. They use a global tag cloud on the main entry page, good looking and useful.

The 3rd image is Keyword Cloud by Mike Nott. I did not find any information but I suspect it's based on search engines as the words: 'news', 'free', 'software' are the biggest.

Hover effects can bring a nice feeling too, not just only colors. If you hover over the tag cloud in my sidebar the tags become bold, I find it makes them feel dynamic(?) I had tried to also change their sizes but here, in a sidebar, I thinks it's too small.

But do we actually use Tag Clouds?
I found 83 Degrees: web2.0 software. Which uses it as a navigation menu.(via rashmi, thanks to zeevveez, see comments. )
Are the Tag Clouds on blogs used? Or are they just decoration? In the case of the one in the sidebar, I think of it as a 'though cloud' but I don't use the hyperlinks, do you?

I did not find any statistics so I create a poll just for that. Please consider answering:

Do you use Tag Clouds?

Other Tag-Cloudy stuff:

theadcloud have a tag cloud with city names: "theadcloud is a community-driven website where you can post free local classified ads on cities." (via TechCrunch)

You may also want to see:

• phydeaux3 by Tag Cloud 9: explains how to show categories created with delicious as a tag cloud.
• del.icio.us tag cloud v1.0 by nickbouton.com: a WordPress plugin that lets you display your del.icio.us tag cloud with a lot of options.
• Revealicious: Set of 3 delicious tag experiments.
• TagCloud: RSS tag cloud generator.
• How To Make a Tag Cloud by Pete Freitag
• dynamic del.icio.us tag cloud viewer by Juice Analytics: This Excel tool downloads your delicious links and creates an animation that shows the evolution of your attention over the course of the year.
• Brrreeeport: Not a cloud but a tag experiment conducted by Microsoft to test different blog search engines. Until very lately it was one of technorati's hot tag. So now the domain names brrreeeport.com, brrreeeport.net are reserved.
• Tagman: A tag hangman game.
• Social Bookmarks: Import and tagging tips: A previous post.

Category: Social, Tags Tags: Tags, Tagging, Text, Color
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