RWT Webmaster Tools Blog

TagCloud Review

TagCloud is an online service providing users the ability to include popular keywords from their site (or others) in the form of tag “cloud”.

If that isn’t clear, here is an explanation straight off the TagCloud site:

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feed you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

If you are still unclear what a TagCloud is, look at the top of the main blog page of this site. THAT is a tag cloud.

I am still debating the usefulness of TagClouds not only for my site but in general. I know of several forums that use TagCloud-like technology to track tags. This is supposed to give an indication of the most popular topics, etc. One problem, however, is over the long term, the cloud becomes “static”. TagClouds are most useful where the type of content being entered has a certain variety AND specificity.

What does the user gain?

A user can easily identify hot topics and the links to the articles within that topic. That is a plus.

Ways to improve:

If there was a way to limit the number of words that appeared in the cloud. Maybe just show the Top Ten words or something like that. The purpose of the cloud is to visually demonstrate the most talked about topics. This is done by making those topics a different color and increasing their font size. This attracts the user’s eye. The words that remain in small font and the normal font color are ignored. No one will pay attention to them because they are not hot topics. So should they even appear in the cloud to begin with??? It seems to me a better way to approach this is to use the same kind of parsing technology to know what the hot topics are, but instead of a cloud, simply return the top ten topics in ranked order. Items one, two and three could have a different color then the rest of the list and even be a font size bigger.

Right now on my blog there are twelve items that appear in orange. To me these are the only ones that should appear. Now that I think about it, I wonder if I could mainpulate it to do what I want by changing the CSS. Hmmm. Will have to play around with that.

My major issue with TagCloud is the speed. Since the cloud is being sent to my site via another server my page takes at least an extra 2-4 seconds to load. If anything were to cause me to remove the TagCloud it would be this issue. Speed is important, I can’t afford to let users wait for the content to appear.

UPDATE: I have temporarily removed tagcloud because of the speed issue. I received a helpful email from tagcloud that suggested using the cache_lite module from PEAR. This would keep the tagcloud cache on my own server and speed up the page load process. Once I have the time to mess with that I will implement it. Also, it was noted that the next version of tagcloud will allow users to limit the number of terms that are returned. That will be cool.

UPDATE: Tagcloud implemented more features. Here is my review.