Sam Lawrence over on GoBigAlways shared the coolest thing in a recent blog post. He tells about TagCrowd. Where TweetClouds creates a cloud of Twitter words, TagCrowd makes a cloud from blog tags.
TagCrowd actually can make a cloud out of random text, and uploaded text file or by scanning a URL for tags. When done, it produces an HTML snippet with it’s own CSS embedded. Unlike Tweetclouds though, no permanent link is provided for the cloud.
How could an up and coming blogger turn these cloud tools this their benefit? They could check out the clouds of successful bloggers and social media gurus. Folks that are ‘celebrities’ might just be doing or at least saying something right.
A big downside obviously presents its self. Where someone might check out their own clouds or one of a blogger they admire, the same tool could easily be used to look for other patterns. Those patterns could reveal a location, marital status, friends or more. One could easily modify the programs to ignore even more common words than they do today, or enhance them to search for given names or location names.
However they are used, tag clouds give more insight into your own work, and the works of others. I’m waiting for the next big thing which will be 3-D tag clouds. Literal clouds.
What’s in your tag cloud?
