What function does a tag cloud serve? [closed]

Question

I see them all the time and always ignore them. Can someone explain to me why they have become so prevalent? If I'm using a site that allows me to explore it via tags (e.g., this one, del.icio.us, etc.) that's what I will do. Why would I need a "cloud" of tags upon which to click? I can just type that tag(s) into a search box. What am I missing?

Answer 1

It's more of a browse assist than a search assist. If you see a large or bold tag in a tag cloud that interests you it my lead to some knowledge discovery that wouldn't have otherwise been sought out with a deliberate search. When I am browsing del.ico.us or stackoverflow I appreciate the tags as they sometimes lead me to discover related topics.

Wikipedia has an interesting definition:

A tag cloud or word cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. 1 Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.

Answer 2

It's a easy mechanism to determine which tags are most popular or how dense that tag is populated ( amount of tags).

It's just a intuative interface, I'm fairly certain that's one of the bigger reason's why they are so popular, that and they are very Web 2.0 also.

Answer 3

Why would I need a "cloud" of tags upon which to click? I can just type that tag(s) into a search box. What am I missing?

How do you know what tags are available to type without a lot of trial and error? Even if you know what tags are available, how do you know which are most popular without a bunch more trial and error?

Answer 4

The thing that makes a tag cloud really useful (at least a well implemented tag cloud IMO) is the ability to drill into a topic deeper and deeper.

For example, I could click "Topic A" and then I can see the items in the tag cloud for all tags within the "Topic A" items. I can then drill into one of those sub topic and narrow the items even further.

The stackoverflow tag cloud doesn't do this (which is too bad), but if it did, I could click something like "visualstudio" to drill into the threads tagged visualstudio then click "asp.net" to drill into that, then "javascript". The end result would be a list of all items tagged all three "visualstudio", "asp.net" and "javascript". This is where a tag cloud becomes really useful. Unfortunately, not all tag clouds work this way (but IMO they should).

Answer 5

Because searching for php is not the same as viewing all posts that the owner has tagged as php. Try it.

Answer 6

It helps you understand the focus of the page or site that you're looking at. What topics being discussed the most? What kinds of information will I find here?

If you search for something related to Java and land on two sites, one with a tag cloud showing 'Java' is prominent, and one where Java is almost invisible but 'C#' is prominent it's pretty easy to quickly decide which site is most valuable to you.

Answer 7

Tags give a way of explicitly labelling something with what it is about instead of relying on computers to extract this information.

For example, you might be interested in on questions about stackoverflow. If you search for "stackoverflow" you will get all kinds of questions that are not about stackoverflow at all (e.g. they only contain the word "stackoverflow" because there is some link to another question). By selecting questions that are tagged with "stackoverflow" you get only those post that people have explicitly identified as being about stackoverflow.