Del.icio.us Tag Cloud

What is a tag cloud, and why should I want one?

For a long time, I just did not understand why del.icio.us was so popular and why a tag cloud and public bookmarks would be useful to me.

When Feedburner added their FeedFlare feature that puts a link below each post in your news feed encouraging folks to bookmark the item at del.icio.us, I decided to take a second look. (You can see an example of these links at the bottom of each article in my John Dilbeck and Friends blog feed.)

One day, it just made sense.

It is so easy to bookmark a page from a website, blog, or any other page on the web to your del.icio.us page. But, that is just the start.

Unlike bookmarking a page in your browser on your computer, you can bookmark the page and store it on one of the servers at del.icio.us. This means that you can access your bookmarks anywhere, just by going to your page at delicious and clicking a tag.

You can easily group similar things together by using multiple tags for each page. By clicking on a tag, you can see all the pages you've tagged with that word.

A buzz cloud may be more helpful to you than a list of bookmarks, because the terms in the cloud vary in size depending upon how many pages you've tagged with that word. The smaller the word in your cloud, the fewer pages you've described using that word. The larger the word, however, the more often you've tagged a page using that word.

This offers, at a glance, an indication of the topics that are of most interest to you and gives you a visual, almost graphic, way to easily find the sites described by your favorite words.

If you want to tag a page with a phrase, you can combine the words using hyphens or just jam the words together by eliminating the spaces between them.

Del.icio.us is a very popular site and you can make your bookmarks public in the form of links or a buzz cloud (see below).

After a few hours of tagging some of my existing, and new, sites, I decided that I'd put up a page here and show my tag cloud, or what del.icio.us calls a tag roll.

I now make a point of posting all my sites, and sites I like, to del.icio.us. This is something I'll continue to do.

It's easy to set up an account at del.icio.us and start bookmarking your favorite pages on the web.

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