Clouds evolve beyond tagging

They're just "clouds" of words that can be used to convey any one of a number of different kinds of weightings in relation to any one of a number of different kinds of sets of data / information.

(I've seen word clouds of taxonomy terms where the weighting reflects recent document count, and I've seen word clouds of employee names where the weighting reflects duration of employment. . .)

I remember seeing these word cloud designs in the past, even pre-web. But, Flickr's use is the first clickable-interface / HTML version I remember using.

One notable distinction between Flickr-era tag clouds and other word clouds is the interactivity: words initiating clickable paths vs non-interactive words that are emphasized (weighted), e.g. in a report (like the Seattle PI example).

What I think might be interesting is when people take non-tag sets of words and use them in clickable word cloud interfaces. Who knows what those interactions will be useful for, but there's certainly potential for there to be interesting uses.

They're just "clouds" of words that can be used to convey any one of a number of different kinds of weightings in relation to any one of a number of different kinds of sets of data / information.

True enough, Jay. But they've been so strongly associated with tagging recently that any non-tagging use seems new(ish).

What I think might be interesting is when people take non-tag sets of words and use them in clickable word cloud interfaces.

Seems like a natural extension of what Bishop did in with his speech cloud. Clicking the word could return a set of paragraphs that use the word. I thought I saw a similar treatment of State of the Union speeches--it'd be interesting to explore those using word clouds over time.