note: a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information like a photo or file to help it be found by searching. Notice that there are tags ("labels")at the bottom of this post.
Here's a tag cloud from Flickr, the photo hosting site, showing the all time most popular tags for the photos on the site. You'll notice that the "cloud" of tags is in alphabetical order so it's easy to find words you may be looking for. The words are of various sizes, the larger ones indicating that there are more photos tagged with those terms. On Flickr, all the terms are hyperlinked so that you can click on it and go right to the photos with that tag.
You can quickly see that the number one category of photos is "weddings" and that most photos seem tied to travel and various locations around the world.
A word cloud is similar to a tag cloud except that it visually shows the relative occurrences of words rather than tags. These can be useful to marketers who have large amounts of written customer interactions (e.g. forums, blogs, Youtube video comments, Facebook groups) and want an easy way to discern the sentiments of the customers without having to read and categorize all the comments.
There are free tools on the Internet to generate word clouds. A good one is Tagcrowd , created by a doctoral student at Stanford University. It's very, very easy to do-just put in the url, upload a file or paste the text to be visualized.
Here's a word cloud I created of this blog:
I'm pleased that "marketing" and "customer" are the strongest themes and that "testing" and "social" show up strongly. If words showed up that I didn't intend to be major themes for this blog, I would know to change my writing.
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