5 Types of Tag Clouds May 2, 2006
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Markus wrote a post over at Performancing about tag clouds and started an interesting discussion. Yours truly added a few comments. At first glance, it may seem that a tag cloud is a tag cloud is a tag cloud, but there are several distinct differences, as far as the source information used to build the clouds is concerned. I’m summarizing here my conclusion about tag clouds, based on the discussion that Markus started.
Types of tag clouds:
- Category-based, using the category names that you have defined on your blog platforms.
- Content-based, using the full text of all your posts to build a keyword profile.
- Excerpt-based, using the text of excerpts of your posts.
- Tag-based, using the tag strings used for bookmarking/ indexing services such as Technorati, Del.icio.us, and so on. (For example, at the bottom of this post, you’ll see a list of links prefaced by the words “Technorati Tags”. I use these to tell Technorati’s index bot how I’m categorizing the post. Since I always try to use tags in my posts that are are somewhat different than my blog platform’s categories, I’m providing supplemental information.)
- Theme pyramid-based. I’ve got an article on this subject almost ready to post here, but in short, a theme pyramid is a multi-page topic index that guides site visitors to your archived posts using related terms to those actually used in your posts.
The above list does not take into account whether the tag cloud creation is created on your blog platform (internally) or externally through a web-based service using RSS/ web feeds. I’ll expand on the above types in the future, or list relevant websites.
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