Tag clouds are much easier to grasp than simple lists, as words can be weighted with the help of font size and color.

We see tag clouds on lots of sites these days. Almost in all cases the purpose of the tag cloud is to give user an easier way to browse the site and at the same time see popular content.

Here are some of my favorite ways tag clouds are used on the web.

1. Discover New Music

The Music Artist Cloud is an artist recommendation engine. Try to “Get Artist Cloud” for a band you like and receive a cloud of similar musicians you might enjoy. I love many of the suggested bands and there are yet a few to be explored.

The site also fetches music videos from YouTube which you can watch while noting down discoveries.

2. Extract Information from Twitter

Using Tweet Cloud you can create a tag cloud based on a keyword or Twitter ID. This tag cloud shows you the major words found in the most recent tweets and their occurrence frequency in relation to each other. The cloud rotates in 3D and you can click words to explore them further.

3. Create Fancy Word Art

Wordle was built for no other purpose than to play with it and create pretty word clouds. You provide the text and can tweak fonts, layouts and color schemes. Results can be printed, downloaded and saved to the Wordle gallery. Below are some recent examples.

4. Improve Google Search

Search Cloudlet is a Firefox extension. The next time you search Google, Yahoo or Twitter after installing this tool you will find a tag cloud on top of the search results. This tag cloud derived from search results and shows you all the keywords relevant to your search results.

Users can easily narrow/filter search by clicking keywords on the cloud and adding them to the query. This is a must-have addon for everyone who frequently searches on Google, Yahoo or Twitter.

Where and how Search Cloudlet appears can be optimized within the extension’s option.

5. Analyze Your Texts

Are there words that you use far too often?

Using a tool like TagCrowd you can create a tag cloud from any text and analyze whether or not your use of words is balanced. You can enter a webpage URL, upload a text document or paste a piece of text and finally finetune the options. When done preparing click Visualize! and wait for the result.

Below is an excerpt from Obama’s inauguration speech.

Where do you find tag clouds helpful?

Image credits: modish

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Search Google, Yahoo, Bing & Twitter From Your IM Program (16)
• How To Search Multiple Social Media Sites At A Time (18)
• How to Expand Google’s Universal Search (20)
• Four Free Sites to Share Your Music On Twitter (15)
• Find A Song Title Just by Humming The Lyrics (19)

Most often they are used on blogs but they are also used in various ways on social networking sites such as Delicious, news sites like Newsvine or even online stores like Amazon. Any site that generates regular or changing content will usually have some sort of tag system in place. So why just the web? Why can’t we have it on our PCs as well?

TaggedFrog is a simple and free file tagging app for Windows XP or Vista that allows for the easy addition of files to be tagged with as many descriptive keywords (tags) as you can possibly think of. You can then visualize them in a cloud display which looks very similar to your everyday cloud display you see on many websites today.

You first begin tagging the files by adding and managing the keywords you’d like to create for your files.

An easy drag and drop interface allows for the easy addition of any type of file, document or web link from your computer. Once they are added, you can simply add any of your created tags to that file.

So now, instead of renaming and changing files as they are created, you can quickly and easily add tags to them. This allows for easy filtering and searching of your hundreds of thousands of files.

Along with the tag cloud, you can also set up “favorites” for locating some of the more popular files and tags. If you’d prefer not to go through and tag all of your files manually, you can also set up options to go through your entire hard drive with the nice “Auto Scan and Tag” feature.

The simple and clean interface, and fast search capability of tags, makes TaggedFrog a great alternative to the Windows Vista launch bar, and MUCH better search alternative than on Windows XP. Adding tags in Vista can be very tedious and having a separate application to keep them organized can become very handy when files begin to pile up on your PC.

There are plenty of other search alternatives (Windows Desktop Search, Google Desktop, etc…) than a tagging application like this. But if you simply want better organization of files, instead of creating hundreds of directories, and you don’t want to bog down your computer with search indexing, then TaggedFrog is likely the right application for you.

What do you think of tagging files instead of simply searching? Are there any other file tagging applications for Windows that you use?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Tag2Find – Tag Files in Windows for Better Organization (4)
• Restore Deleted Files Easily With Recuva (12)
• Vista Switcher – Replace Windows’ Alt-Tab With Something Cooler (9)
• Tweak Your Windows Operating System With Xpy (10)
• Tweak Windows XP/Vista/7 to Your Taste with XdN Tweaker (10)

Zoom Clouds offers a simple way to include a tag cloud on your Blogger blog. The process only takes about 5 minutes to complete.

3 Steps to Add a Tag Cloud to Blog

• Create a account at Zoomclouds
• Design your cloud.
• Add the HTML code to your site as a widget.

Step 1:

Sign up by giving yourself a username, adding your email, and create a password.

Step 2:

Once you have verified your account you are ready to create your tag cloud. Fill out the form with:

• your tag cloud name (no spaces in the name)
• a short description
• your RSS feed URL
• how many days you would like to include

When you have filled out the form click Create Cloud!

On the next page click Go update my cloud! so the system can grab information from your RSS feed to generate keywords for your tag cloud. When the system is complete click set the look of your cloud. . . to customize the look of it.

Click Design at the top right to change the size, font, border, pixel width, and link colors.

Click Filters to add keywords to the list that you do not want the tag cloud to show. You can also add words you definitely want the tag cloud to show all of the time.

When you have the tag cloud the way you want it, go back to Design and copy the HTML code to use on your Blogger blog as a widget.

Here is an example of a Zoom tag cloud I made for my site. Try it and you will see that it is very easy to create a tag cloud for Blogger using ZoomClouds.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Use Skribit On Your Blog to Get Reader Suggestions (11)
• Top 10 Blogger Hacks and Tips (123)
• The Six Ways To Add A Chat Room To Your Website (21)
• How To Post To Blogger From Your Cell Phone (14)
• How To Add A Simple Search To Your Blogger Blog (17)