Tag Clouds

Tag clouds provide information about information. A tag cloud, also called a word cloud, presents a visual image of words on a Web site or tags used to describe entries on a Web site.

An alphabetical list from Flickr shows us that wedding, london, and travel are very popular categories on this photo sharing site. The larger the word, the more entries there are with that tag.

LibraryThing http://www.librarything.com/tagcloud.php provides an image of the keywords that members have assigned to the books they enter into the Web site. Each word in the cloud is a hyperlink, so you can click on the word and see the related entries.

Info pros can take advantage of tools like this to enhance products and services. Information aggregators such as Factiva deliver tag clouds through Search 2.0. A search on oil prices yielded a word cloud revealing connections to other topics in the news such as tropical storm Fay.

Are you including information about information in your products and services? If so, feel free to share your ideas and views with other Info Biz readers.