I'm currently reading some academic papers on Google Scholar, but I'm interested in the personal experiences of developers and web designers - when do you and don't you use tag clouds instead of another visualization method?
+4
A:
I personally find tag clouds that use different sizes of characters to represent tag counts a visual mess and a bit of a fad'ish approach. I prefer to see an ordered list with the most popular at the top (with a count next to each tag). But that's maybe just me.
Kev
2008-10-10 12:53:32
Tag clouds don't have to be messy. The one at http://delicious.com/tag, for example, is clean and functional.
Patrick McElhaney
2010-06-03 12:41:54
@Patrick - hmmm....still looks like a big wall of text, but not the worst I'll grant you that.
Kev
2010-06-04 11:33:34
+1
A:
In my opinion - always a bad thing.
I hate the bloody things. Messy and unusable.
Martin
2008-10-10 12:55:12
+3
A:
Tag clouds are useful to show both what tags exist (in alphabetical order so it's easy to locate one) and the relative prominence of each tag.
Personal experience: I used a tag cloud for the skills section of my resume.
Patrick McElhaney
2008-10-10 13:08:36
After I'm done with this internship, I'll be rewriting my resume...and I know what I'll be doing with the skills section. Thanks. :)
Thomas Owens
2008-10-10 13:27:46
My pleasure. :-) More information on the skills cloud here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5905/writing-a-good-resumecv#5931
Patrick McElhaney
2008-10-10 13:29:56
+1
A:
I would have to say that I not a big huge fan of tag clouds, I just think there are better was to layout tags then in this mess of words on the side of the page.
Nathan W
2008-10-10 13:15:29