What is and Why have a 'tag cloud'?

[VEX]

What is and Why have a 'tag cloud' on a web site.

Is it just an open book type of thing where they used to be hidden in the code of the page?

V.

[MrP80]

Useful for blogs etc, give the common tags in use, with the tags getting bigger the more the tag is used as people post content. It means you don't have to search for commonly used tags and you can just see what is popular currently. Less useful on a static site IMO

Edited by MrP80 on Friday 4th July 09:14

[Accelebrate]

VEX said:

Is it just an open book type of thing where they used to be hidden in the code of the page?

Not really, tags are typically assigned to site content (be it photos, videos, blog posts, whatever) and would rarely serve any sort of major purpose to make the site operate. They're simply used as filters or keywords to find content that has the same tags assigned.

The tag cloud design sprang up because it's quite a neat way of showing the popularity of tags, I think flickr was the first major site to use one and I guess lots of people thought it was fancy and copied. They're considered very 'web 2.0' which will instantly make them popular

[VEX]

So as you say, not much use on a fairly static, small commercial site.

Thanks.

V.

[fade2grey]

essentially, tags are meta-data which describes what it is a user is looking at. So for a smaller\more static site it could be used to enable more accurate\advanced searching based on the context of what ever it is you are looking at.

[Accelebrate]

Surely if a site had searching/filtering by tags it would cease to be static and would be dynamic?