What’s a Flash® Tag Cloud?

A blog is a website where periodic entries by a person or business are made, tagged, and archived. A tag is descriptive text assigned to a blog post that helps categorize it. It is customary to use multiple tags to describe a single entry so that people searching for different types of keywords can find relevant entries. A tag cloud is a way to view the tags of all blog posts, and one type of tag cloud is a Flash® tag cloud.

A blog has several ways to reveal its focus. The title is one-way. Design is another. Articles as a whole are a third, but once there’s a large amount of material on the site and most of it is archived – often by month and year – the sense of the whole is hard to grasp. A tag cloud is created by a plugin and draws from the tags of all articles that have been written and helps give readers the gist of the site.

Tag clouds communicate in several ways. The inclusion, of course, is the main one, but color and size are also used. After a blogger has been a regular contributor to a blog for a while, it becomes quite difficult to fit all the tags into a reasonable space and/or read them all. This is where the Flash® tag cloud comes into play. The Flash® tag cloud places tags on a sphere, which the user can rotate by clicking near the cloud and dragging in various directions. In this design, there is more “space” for the tags, making them easier to see and click through if you want to see related blog posts.

Flash® tag cloud was developed as a WordPress® plugin by Roy Tanck in 2008 and he originally just posted it on his blog, calling it “WP-Cumulus Flash® based tag cloud”. He provided a download after developing it to his satisfaction and instructed people to reuse it for HTML sites and other content management systems. An adaptation for Flickr®, a photo publishing site, creates a cloud of image thumbnails.

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