Tags are one of the hot new features online. Basically, a tag is a descriptor (metadata, if you will, that is added to something like a picture or web page or what have you so that people can find it. Flickr is a superlative example of tag usage. People can view pictures and apply tags that describe the picture in a way that’s meaningful to them. Then they can browse Flickr to find pictures with particular tags. Pretty cool! I haven’t used Flickr myself much (at least for posting my own pictures), but the tags are a very helpful element of navigating and organizing pictures.

Anyway, tag CLOUDS are a result of the proliferation of tags. A tag cloud is a group of tags that are all displayed together and that show the particular keywords that occur most frequently within the groups of tags being searched. The more frequently the term is used, the larger the text of its tag. Typically a tag cloud can be derived from either a collection of all the tags used (e.g., a collection of photos) or an examination of all the words used in the posts (e.g., an RSS feed).

Now you can create your own tag clouds based on RSS feeds. Whether it’s just one feed or a huge group of them, TagCloud.com will check the feed(s) and create a tag cloud for the most frequently used terms in the body of the articles being posted (not the lists of links in a sidebar).

And even cooler? You can click any of the tags to bring up a list (with snippets or initial paragraphs) of all the posts or stories that used the term. Just think about the possibilities here! You can create a tag cloud for one or more of the major news websites and then get a snapshot of what terms are being used the most in current news stories. And then you can click the term to get summaries and links to all of those stories. That was the original purpose for developing TagCloud, but there are many other uses that continue to add value to the Internet in possibly unforeseen ways.

It’s a whole new way to keep up with the current issues of the day. Or to see a visual representation of the core concepts of someone’s blog. Plus, they give you code to put into the head and body of your web page if you’d like to display the cloud on a web page. Or you can link to their site where they display it for you.

For example: http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/LibBlogs/default/50 is my tag cloud for a dozen of the library-related blogs that I read the most.

And http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/Headlines/default/50 is a link to a tag cloud for a collection of all the major network news sites (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, Yahoo News, and Google News). The actual Tag Cloud shows the most recent information every time it is loaded, and right now it looks like this:

FYI, my personal blog’s tag cloud is here and my professional blog’s tag cloud is here, and it’s very different from my personal blog, as I would expect. (My personal one is having issues, so it won’t load right now.)

So stop by TagCloud.com and give it a try. It’s free and quite informative!

Current music: Soundtrack from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring