Reaction:Tag Clouds and the Case for Vernacular Visualization

Tag clouds is the fastest growing visualization and can be used in almost all of the datasets. The primary field is the word frequencies and the relations between the words. This paper published by the IBM research explains about the details of the tag clouds.

This visualization is growing because the basic look of a tag cloud is a combination of many different type sizes in a single view. This can be used in a vareity of fields ranging from tags in a blog websites to maps of countries. This can be made more powerful by adding many different versions. IBM's own Manyeyes system which lets users upload and visualize data in a variety of ways, features two flavors of tag clouds: the traditional one-word and an unconventional two-word view. This method provides an easier way to understand the content.

Tag clouds are one of the best visualization to analyze the relations between any objects. This paper is a must read for all of the visualization engineers.