Reaction: Tag clouds and the case for vernacular visualization.

The article describes the problems of a "vernacular" visualization tool such as tag clouds, and presents an analysis of when the first tag cloud was created, and how the Web 2.0 used it to aggregate unstructured information.

In my opinion, this articles describes the problems of tag clouds, and help the reader realize that even though it has many problems, people are still using tag clouds because it is a way to visualize text in a simple way. The article finishes by asking the theorists to rethink their visualizations tools. I agree with the article in that tag clouds have all the problems they describe (i.e. long words get unnoticed, find a word can be difficult, font size doesn't give concrete information about the word), but it can be a simple way to understand the text you are analyzing, and can give you the first step to understand all your text corpus.