Visual Tag Clouds

A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags 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. 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.

A tag cloud is a set of related tags with corresponding weights. Typical tag clouds have between 30 and 150 tags. The weights are represented using font sizes or other visual clues. Meanwhile, histograms or pie charts are most commonly used to represent approximately a dozen different weights. Hence, tag clouds can represent many more weights, though less accurately so. Also, frequently, tag clouds are interactive: tags are hyperlinks typically allowing the user to drill down on the data.

As a Flash developer I thought it would be nice to display the tags in a dynamic virtual tag. I was planning on using Papervision 3D to do this, but then stumbled across this blog post. The hard work had already been done after a wordpress plugin was created.

Rather than re-write the script, I simply modified it to work with the data in my database and hey presto I now have a dynamic and interesting tag cloud.

Take a look at it in action, over at my other site flCodr.