What are Tag Clouds and how can we use them?
Have Tag Clouds ever peaked your curiosity? I’ve always been a fan of keeping up with the trends in technology and I think Tag Clouds in general are one of the more interesting side effects of Web2.0.
I’ve always taken a liking to them but hadn’t found a lot of use until recently. I asked the question “What can we learn from a Tag Cloud?”… and “How can I as a marketer use this seemingly random display of data to my advantage?”
So I went searching for some answers and came up with some very cool sites…
Now, if you’re not exactly sure what a tag cloud is, you might have seen them before and not even known it. The most popular tag clouds are found on sites like del.icio.us, flickr and technorati.
Those three sites alone can provide tremendous insights into what the world is thinking (and tagging) about in real time. The idea is people tag sites, photos and blogs with meaningful keywords and then they become available publicly to everyone. You can then browse topics by tags that other people have categorized various materials under.
A practical use of this would be to see what are the hot topics that people are blogging about or taking photos of.
Another few interesting sites to glean what’s going on around the web are Newzingo a tag cloud that follows the top stories on Google News and AuctionCloud.com which allows you to see what’s being searched on ebay in a cloud view. I can think of a few uses for competitive research with this site. 
Some tools that I found to be very useful are TagCrowd.com which allows you to actually paste in your own text, maybe an article, email or blog posting and see a cloud view of the word density, and CloudAlicio.us which is an interesting time archive of del.icio.us bookmarks.
Take a moment and explore some of these new tools to analyze their data to see what types of market insight and trends you can spot to improve the power of your business.
