* Creating tag clouds with ZoomClouds from AR Networks
According to Wikipedia: “A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a Web site. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.”
As you might have guessed, tag clouds are today’s topic and if they sound like something you might want to use, here’s a site that will create tag clouds for you: ZoomClouds, a service provided by AR Networks.
Once you register with ZoomClouds (for free) you can start creating your own tag clouds. You give your cloud a name, a title or description, specify the feed (only RSS and Atom feeds are supported), and specify how many days worth of the feed should be included.
The next step requires ZoomClouds to fetch the feed and analyze it. After that, ZoomClouds will regularly fetch the feed and build the ZoomClouds automatically (it also rebuilds your cloud data automatically whether or not you are online – its servers do all the work).
The final step is to customize your cloud’s look, which also generates the HTML code you need to paste into your Web page or whatever (click here for a demo in Gibbsblog).
ZoomClouds are pretty good looking and there are several display options, such as whether dots are used between displayed tags and if the count for each tag is shown.
When you click on a tag in a ZoomClouds tag cloud you are taken to a ZoomClouds Web page. This page displays the feed item the tag came from as well as advertising, which is presumably how ZoomClouds makes money.
You can also just extract the data from your tag cloud so that you can do with it what you’d like using the ZoomClouds API. All that the company requires for this service is for your site to display a ZoomClouds graphic that links to their site.
This is a neat way of distilling the importance of the tags in a news feed. Further, if you were to combine multiple feeds using one of the tools I covered in previous issues of this newsletter you could use ZoomClouds to “weigh” and show the most commented on items. Let me know if you try this out on your Web site, I’m interested in hearing the results.
The ZoomClouds service is free and the company claims they plan to keep it that way forever.
