Problem summary

The user wants to browse content by popularity in a visually appealing way.

Solution

A tag cloud is a list of tags, where the font size of each tag is larger or bigger depending on its weight. Weight in tag clouds can be represented in three different ways:

1. Size represents the number of times that a tag has been applied to a single item.
   This kind of tag cloud can help define the distribution of how the item is categorized.
2. Size represents the number of items to which a tag has been applied
   As a presentation of each tag’s popularity.
3. Size represents the quantity of content items in that category
   Tags are used as a categorization method for content items1

There are several opinions on how tags should be ordered. Examples of ways to order tags are:

• Alphabetically
• Randomly
• By weight
• In clusters of semantically similar tags (similar tags appear next to eachother)

Rationale

Tag clouds helps visualize semantic fields; how some categories have greater importance than others.

It can also help give an impression of what content is to be found on a site and which categories of content the site is focused on.