A tag cloud on the popular photo sharing site Flickr.
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 links[]
- 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.