Tim comments over at the LibraryThing blog about click-based tag clouds, like this one from the State of Delaware website.
I’m not so sure why this seems surprising or innovative. Tim rightly notes that tag clouds are more commonly used to represent tagged items. But fundamentally, a tag cloud is just a kind of textual histogram, where
- rather than a horizontal axis, the axis is wrapped across multiple lines (like text), making it more compact
- rather than a bar whose height indicates magnitude, the font size (typically scaled) shows magnitude
So you can use a tag cloud for any kind of frequency distribution whose labels are textual. For example:
- word counts from a document (i used to have Hyper-concordance views like this, though they’ve gone missing in action)
- article titles for a blog, where the magnitude might be # of page views, # of citations by Google/del.icio.us/Connotea/you name it, # of sentences
- wiki pages by # of outbound or inbound links
- content and prosody measures for a text (see this old Blogos post)
I’m not surprised people like them: they can be a very effective visualization tool. But i am surprised people are surprised by the fact that they’re being used in more than just one way.