Tag Cloud Mania

Want to see a tag cloud of Web 2.0? How about Bill Gates CES speech? Or the Presidential Address?

January 19th, 2007 at 5:00am — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Web 2.0

I'm currently rebuilding DCS Media and I'm thinking about adding a tag cloud to the site. A tag cloud adds a certain "what's popular at-a-glance" view to your audience and a "what is the audience looking at?" to the authors of the site.

Tag clouds aren't specific to a particular industry by any means and provides a great way to see what's important based on the content.

For the technology industry, Mr. O'Reilly made this post about a Web 2.0 tag cloud, which is a great visualization for describing Web 2.0. The tag cloud was built by Andrew Odewahn, the director of the O'Reilly Network, and Tim Allwine, and gives some indication of what  Web 2.0 is comprised of.

From that post from Mr. O'Reilly, you'll notice other tag clouds that were built.

Take, for example, the Presidential Address, or the number of popular O'Reilly books, or the Bill Gates Keynote speech he made at CES.

Now, I don't want to base my decision on just one post from O'Reilly, but as you surf the web, there are more tag clouds popping up everywhere and almost considered as a staple in the Web 2.0 space. It's just a gadget that describes the popular content of your site, but also gives your audience a visual index of the focused keywords included in your content.

And giving your audience what they want is what's important, right?

Do you have a tag cloud on your site yet?