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A Topic Cloud® is a visual representation of data on a website that includes metadata. It shows frequently discussed topics with bigger and bolder tags. It’s useful for revealing trends and is often used by bloggers and news aggregation sites. It’s clickable and can lead to related articles or nested topic clouds.
A Topic Cloud®, similar to a tag cloud, is a visual representation of data written to a website. It differs from a tag cloud, however, in that it also includes other data that tag clouds generally don’t contain. This additional data can include things like publication dates, author names, and other metadata.
The Topic Cloud® takes the form of a list of short tags that briefly describe the issues discussed on a website. The more often a tag is used, the bigger and bolder it gets. A casual look at the cloud shows users which topics are being discussed most frequently. Clicking on a single topic usually results in a navigation switch, such as opening a list of articles covering that topic or creating another such cloud.
This type of visual representation is often called a weighted list in graphic design, because in addition to providing a list of tags, it also provides metadata. Metadata is data about data. A static list of tags will help users roughly determine what a website is about. A Topic Cloud®, on the other hand, provides data about tags. Using a Topic Cloud® can sometimes reveal trends on a website that aren’t immediately apparent to a casual glance. It’s also a fun tool for website owners to use, especially if they’re curious about long-term trends on their websites.
Bloggers use Topic Clouds extensively, building a list of key phrases on topics they frequently cover so visitors can quickly assess whether or not they want to stay on the blogger’s site. News aggregation sites also use the concept, so that users can see what news is “hot” at the moment. Keywords in the cloud will also show up in internet searches, if they’ve been well coded. Internet users searching for a particular topic can access a website through its Topic Cloud®.
Perhaps the most basic aspect of Topic Cloud® is its static illustration of topics. However, most designers make their clouds clickable, allowing users to interact with them. For example, a news site might display a list of articles related to the topic the user clicked on. Other designers create a series of nested topic clouds. A user might start with, for example, a site-level cloud. If the user sees an issue of interest and clicks on it, the issue of interest becomes the center of a new cloud; which contains related topics. From there, the user can explore the sections of the site dealing with these topics.
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