A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.
It would be possible to represent weights using histograms. However, whereas histograms typically are used to represent less than 20 numerical values, tag clouds are used to represent the relative weights of 50, 100, or even 150 tags.
The first use of tag clouds was on the photo sharing website Flickr, created by Flickr co-founder and interaction designer Stewart Butterfield. .That implementation was based on Jim Flanagan's Search Referral Zeitgeist, a visualization of web site referrers. Tag clouds have also been popularised by Del.icio.us and Technorati, among others.
The first published appearance of a tag cloud can be attributed to the "subconscious files" in,t Douglas Coupland's Microserfs (1995)
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