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Tag cloud

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A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) can be used as 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 use of tag clouds was on the photo sharing website Flickr.[citation needed] That implementation was based on Jim Flanagan's Search Referral Zeitgeist, a visualization of web site referrers. Tag clouds have also been popularised by Del.icio.us and Technorati, among others.

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

Types

There are two main types of tag cloud, distinguished by their meaning rather than appearance.

In the first type, 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.

See also

Bibliography

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