Tag Clouds

What's a tag cloud?

The grouping of words under Tags for This Article is called a "tag cloud". The cloud shows you all the tags associated with this article.

Tags are a new style of search data that describe what each article is about. The tag cloud is therefore a visual map of the article content. Tags that are large and bold are written about a lot, tags that are smaller have only been written about a few times. Click on a tag and you get a page showing you all the content on that topic.

Tags are a new form of information design pioneered by the most successful online organizations. They offer another way to navigate content on a site, showing patterns, the scope of content available, and how popular different keywords are.

The number connected to each tag is the number of articles (and quicklinks & diaries) which have been assigned that particular tag. You can choose to turn that count OFF, if you wish.

You can also choose to view the tag cloud by popularity, or alphabetically. (The numbers stay the same; simply the tag arrangement changes.)

Initially, you view tags "for all time" meaning all the content since the site was established. But you can also narrow the time period by choosing to view content over the last 6 months, or over the last month, or over the last week, or in the last 24 hours. Naturally, the number of articles/quicklinks/diaries will substantially change as you narrow the time.

The button labeled Tags (if selected) will show a tag cloud for all the tags that have been selected for the article by the content submitter and editors. If you use the Related Tags button, you'll see a tag cloud showing all the other tags in the same directory category that the tags selected in the article are in. This could be a LOT and it could take a long time for the tag cloud to appear.

By exploring tag clouds and choosing different options as described above, you get a good, overall picture of the content that has been submitted.