Tag clouds as a research object
Tag clouds are a nice way to visualize the content tags of a website. Flickr started this trend when they displayed a “All-time most popular tags” tag cloud on their front page. The size of the tags in the tag cloud is usually relative (more frequently used tags are displayed in a larger font). In this way you can quickly see what is hot and what is not on a webpage.
But when you add the dimension of time things get really interesting. You can actually map out shifts in tag usage. Chirag Meta created a Tagline Generator “that lets you generate chronological tag clouds from simple text data sources without manually tagging the data entries.” Two nice applications of this generator are:
- US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud
You can see a shift from “welfare” to “terrorism” - Microsoft’s evolution, in keywords
The word “computer” is disappearing, interesting!
It might be nice if you could focus on one word, or a set of related words, so you could follow a certain trend. What else can we do with tagclouds (except making a t-shirt out of it of course)?