TagClouds, What’s That? What’s Hot!
Tuesday, September 13th, 2005
Imagine you’re moving down a crowded city street. You are surrounded by people thinking their own thoughts. What would the topics they are considering look like if you could plot them somehow? Let’s not go there, you might not want to know…
Well then, how about imagining a bunch of blogs, magazines, newspapers on the Web. If you could plot the topics they are discussing, what would that look like?
A TagCloud, that’s what. TagClouds do just that – they extract keywords from the content you specify and list them according to their prevalence.
Let’s take a look at two TagClouds that I created for my web site:
Langfeldesigns TagClouds
The first one shows current keywords in a selection of Design blogs. The second one shows current keywords in a selection of news web sites. The larger and brighter the word, the larger the number of references were found by the application.
TagClouds may seem a little frivolous, but they could help you put your finger on the pulse of your audience, if you could identify blogs created by or for your audiences. As time goes on, they will give us the ability to show what’s hot!