Reaction: Tag Clouds and the Case for Vernacular Visualization

The tag clouds have become a popular way of visualizing word frequencies in various situations. The tag clouds or more appropriately word clouds can be used as a navigation helper on various websites that attract users and are very attractive to look at used on the website using tag clouds. As the author says the tag clouds are a complete violation of the visualization design guidelines, but still play an important role in  showing off interesting trends of a website when used to analyse trends, statistics on realtime etc..,

I think further research in the field of tag clouds in visualizing content relating them to the semantics of the words would be worthwhile in creating meaningful visualizations. I contradict with the point that tag clouds are a vernacular visualizations only as they may have evolved in a much different way, but further study of tag clouds along with analytics and using them in fields like text analysis and natural language processing would significantly improve the understanding of those subjects.