To Tag or Not to Tag...is that the question?

It seems like tagclouds are all the rage. When I first heard about it I was a little confused about whether one refers to it as tagclouds or Tagcrowds. To clarify, the latter is the "application" and the former is what we generate. My experience with it all has been very recent...like a few minutes ago. But since I haven't blogged for a while I thought this to be the perfect opportunity. It looks a little like this in case you're wondering what I am blabbering about.

audacity bit blog bloggie button comes comments convenience conversation cput digital dmdude editing encourage everyone following found friends group human increase interaction keep learning maybe networking personal picture posted presentation quality reactions really record rethinking seems session shox sites social software sound story teaching technology think useful video workshop world

created at TagCrowd.com

So what it ultimately allows you to do is to visualize word frequency. You can input text or a website or simply paste text into a field and it will generate a "word collage" related to how frequently certain words appear in a body of text. The above tagcloud is actually developed from this very blog simply by entering the url address. So instead of reinventing the wheel and trying to explain everything with my rather limited vocabulary, I will direct you to the site http://www.tagcrowd.com There are other options available that does more or less the same thing but you can judge for yourself which one you would find useful. For me it boils down to which is the more user-friendly.I enjoyed the http://www.wordle.net rendition even though I am a bit disappointed that it doesn't generate an embed code but a link to the site.

Zoomclouds is another but unfortunately the site was unavailable at the time of writing this blog. Don't know whether that says something about the application itself. I am gonna challenge my students to do their own tagclouds of their blogs. Have FUN!