What is a Tag Cloud, and How to Use It?

Long Version:

If you’re not familiar with the tag cloud, it is a navigation tool that has gained prevalence with Web 2.0 and the abundance of user-generated content sites. Many of these sites realize that people are too lazy to categorize their pictures, movies, links, whatever, into a sensible set of categories, so they allow their users to just type any old word in to describe their content. Then, these sites take the most popular words, and throw them in a big, steaming heap, and bump up the font size of the most popular ones, giving you the “tag cloud”.

Credit to passage from above:

http://joeldowns.com/2007/03/04/why-everyone-should-use-tag-clouds/

Short Version:

Tag clouds are another way of navigating websites. The admin of the website has labelled posts with a different word (a tag). Once a user clicks on a tag, let's say 'games,' all the posts that are related to games will show up. Popularity of the tag (the # of posts tagged onto it) also bump up its font size.

How to Use:

Simply click on a tag, and posts that are labelled with that tag will show up. And I mean all the posts that are labelled with that tag.

It's as easy as that! Try it out on the right-hand sidebar!

What is a Tag Cloud?

As of 10 minutes ago, I just inputted my new tag cloud, Blogumus into my blogger site. This is no ordinary tag cloud, but rather, it SPINS in relation to your CURSOR!

Tag Clouds basically act as a director for my blog. Once you click on one of the words, it will direct you to the posts that are related that word or topic you just clicked.

Normal tag clouds usually look like this:

These types of tag clouds display all the topics as if they are on a flat table, and the words change size according to how many posts are tagged to that word. 

My tag cloud, on the other hand, rotates and spins according to the position of your cursor (mouse) AND the size of the words change in relation to the number of posts tagged to them.

methinks this is exciting!