What is the most interesting tag cloud implementation that you know? I'm searching for something easy to work with but somewhat non-standard. I know of WP-Cumulus 3D tag cloud, I'm interested in an interesting implementation - not necessarily in visual terms (as an example, a semantic grouping tag cloud can also be interesting).
A tag cloud is a small summary of tags used throughout your website and can be implemented for several reasons: as an alternative navigation, to provide a quick overview of the website, article, pictures,… and an attempt to give the SEO (search engine optimization) a boost.
A tag cloud, also known as a word cloud, wordle, or weighted list, is a visual representation of the most popular words (or tags) found in free-form text. The size of tags or single words, and collocations, is proportionate to how often they appear in your text.
Word clouds (also known as text clouds or tag clouds) work in a simple way: the more a specific word appears in a source of textual data (such as a speech, blog post, or database), the bigger and bolder it appears in the word cloud.
Clicking on one of the tags in the cloud will take you to all of the content labelled with that tag, meaning it is a quick way to see a lot of information on a topic. They are called clouds because the tags are often presented together in a way that gives the group a shape similar to a cloud.
Form over Function disease!
The tag cloud concept is to show tags and their frequency, typically with proportional font size
The Cumulus 3D and similars are just special effects and do not show frequency very well, or at all!
Stick to the basics and your users will love you
Colour coding tags into groups is the simplest improvement without distorting the nominal function. Show the colour legend if possible
I personally also like colour intensity to indicate the recent usage of tags. A popular tag that has no recent posts will be in a large font size, but in a low colour intensity so that it fades away and looks less important. e.g.
The most interesting tag clouds are probably those by Jeff Clark.
(source: neoformix.com)
(source: neoformix.com)
(source: neoformix.com)
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