Service: TagCloud Launched: June 2005 Location: Bellwood, PA Status: Corporate name is IonZoft What is it? TagCloud is a service that generates a “tagcloud” (see below) based on provided URLs or feeds. A tagcloud is basically a grouping of tags associated with content, from a single or multiple sources. Tagclouds are a visual tool – tags used more often are bigger and/or darker than less used tags, allowing a visual representation of relative tag use. Clicking on a tag takes the user to relevant content related to the tag – basically a list of content associated with such tag (ranking is usually by date, or freshness, but this is not a requirement. TagCloud is a tool for creating tagclouds. A key fact to point out right at the start is that TagCloud uses keyword (text) analysis, not tag/category analysis, in creating the tag cloud. This is a point of contention (or at least discussion) around the service and worth noting as you read on. Here’s a visual example of a tagcloud (remember that in a real tag cloud each item is clickable and links to relevant content): The reason tagclouds are useful, instead of merely visually entertaining, is that they show in a very clear way the most popular tags and link directly to associated content. This will become increasingly important as the RSS aggregation and search applications collide in the near future (underlined because I am going to point back to this post in 2 years and say “I told you so”). If you are mathematically inclined, I highly recommend reading Pietro Speroni’s three articles on tagclouds linked to below (see Links). There really is something to this other than a neat visual trick. TagClouds is an easy to use service, and other than the contentious issue of using text/keyword analysis instead of category/tag analysis, the only problem is that they are extremely slow to generate. Since a key feature is adding these to your blog, the load time can be prohibitively long. An easy fix would be for Tagcloud to cache content periodically and present that cached (and slightly dated) content instead of re-generating the tag cloud on every html or xml call – I assume they are considering this. The speed issue is a killer and I would much prefer slightly old data instead of waiting 2-3 minutes for my blog to fully load in a browser. → Read More