Tag clouds may have become a little passe for websites but they offer lots of scope for written reports.
Tag clouds may have become a little passe for websites but they offer lots of scope for written reports.
Tag clouds became synonymous with early Web 2.0 sites like del.icio.us and Technorati but in more recent times they have become seen as a little passe and replaced with alternative navigation / visualisation techniques.
Tag clouds come in many different forms and this article from Smashing Magazine contains some really great examples and good practices.
The microformats wiki also has some good tag cloud examples together with a brainstorming page for a potential hTagcloud.
I tweeted this morning about using Word Clouds after reading a blog post by @Jas that illustrated Ray Ozzie's PDC2008 keynote as a Word Cloud:
Following replies from @rivets and @aeioux it prompted me to apply that tweet and start using tag / word clouds.
That afternoon I used the excellent Wordle (example below of last 10 blog entries from this blog) on a number of different sources:
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to summarise a document describing a technical "conceptual framework";
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to complement the executive summary of a business plan
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to distill the essence of a questionnaire / survey response document
Showing the Word Clouds to people that had never seen them before proved to illustrate the point that visualisation of this nature definitely has a role in simplifying information, so yes, in summary I will be using Word Clouds in the future...!
Another example from Wordle relating to the BBC News page on the "laymans finance crisis glossary" is shown below:
