Tags are one of the hot new features online. Basically, a tag is a descriptor (metadata, if you will, that is added to something like a picture or webpage or what have you so that people can find it. Flickr is a superlative example of tag usage. People can view pictures and apply tags that describe the picture in a way that’s meaningful to them. Then they can browse Flickr to find pictures with particular tags. Pretty cool!

Well, tag CLOUDS are a result of the proliferation of tags. A tag cloud is a group of tags that are all displayed together and that show the particular keywords that occur most frequently within the groups of tags being searched. The more frequently the term is used, the larger the text of its tag. Typically a tag cloud can be derived from either a collection of all the tags used (e.g., a collection of photos) or an examination of all the words used in the posts (e.g., an RSS feed).

Now you can create your own tag clouds based on RSS feeds. Whether it’s just one feed or a huge group of them, TagCloud.com will check the feed(s) and create a tag cloud for the most frequently used terms.

And even cooler? You can click any of the tags to bring up a list (with snippets or initial paragraphs) of all the posts or stories that used the term. Just think about the possibilities here! You can create a tag cloud for one or more of the major news websites and then get a snapshot of what terms are being used the most in current news stories. And then you can click the term to get summaries and links to all of those stories.

It’s a whole new way to keep up with the current issues of the day. Or to see a visual representation of the core concepts of someone’s blog.

For example: http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/LibBlogs/default/50 is my tag cloud for a dozen of the library-related blogs that I read the most. Every time you load the cloud, you get the most recent information. Here is the current tag cloud for these library-related blogs:

And http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/BibliotechWeb/default/50 is a link to the tag cloud for just this BiblioTechWeb blog. (FYI, my personal blog’s tag cloud is here, and it’s very different from my professional blog, as I would expect.)

So stop by TagCloud.com and give it a try. It’s free and quite informative!