Apr 11 2008
Generating your own Tag Cloud using Tag Crowd
I have always been fascinated with the art of Visualizing information. Tag Clouds (or weighted list in visual design) are a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. By using a tag cloud, you can see which tags have a high, medium or low occurrence on a web site. The bigger and bolder the word, the higher weighting it has received.
TagCrowd.com is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud. The site was created by Daniel Steinbock, a doctoral student in Design and Education at Stanford University. The site allows you to enter a URL and it will quickly scan the site and develop a visual representation of the tags used on the site.
Outlined below is the current TagCrowd Visualization of Siodmak.com:
By viewing your website content in this manner you can learn a lot about your content. When I first ran TagCrowd against my blog, I immediately noticed that “Colleague” received a very high rating. This is not because I have a lot of different blog posts about colleagues. It is simply because my recently post entitled, “Pulling an ‘April Fools’ joke on a colleague via instant messaging” contains a chat transcript where the word “colleague” appears over 20 times. As with any content analysis, you can not blindly accept the visual presentation presented.
Through careful analysis this tool can help you better understand the core content of the material you have posted. Additionally, it can also help you better understand how web crawler and other external elements view your site.
