What Does Your Tag Cloud Say About You?

It is incredibly important to focus your content to one field, niche, or industry and try to deviate from it as little as possible. The mark of a good blog is how consistently focused its content is, and a quick way to judge blogs in this respect is to look at their tag clouds (and if not available, just look at the list of categories).

The idea struck me when I was looking at a group of tag clouds on Pollster based on the MSNBC Democratic debate. The tag clouds analyze the speeches given by the participants and shows the most frequently used words in larger and bolder print. Look at the following three clouds:

msaleem_GravelTag400.png

msaleem_KucinichTag400.png

msaleem_ObamaTag400.png

As you can see, none of them present a clear train of thought (perhaps rightly so), rather they are cluttered with several disparate ideas. Applying the same idea to a blog, have a look at the tag cloud from my friend Stan Schroeder's blog:

msaleem_frantcloud.png

Right away you can see that Web 2.0 is the prevailing theme of the site, but that he also looks at the social web as a subset of the larger space. Focusing your content is the first step in building a loyal readership.

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Reader Comments (3)

TourPro, April 30, 2007

So true. Some day people will judge you by your folksonomy.

I feature my del.icio.us cloud as my linklist.

Hans, April 30, 2007

I think as long trail keywords/tags are getting more popular, tag clouds for blog might not be such an important issue to consider to know the main subject of interest of a blogger.

Take the UTW plugins, it allows you to convert tags into keywords so people will make sure that they choose their tags > keywords carefully, this including long trail when choosing them.

Do you have any topics relating long trail keywords with tags?

Thanks for sharing your insight on the subject.

taly weiss, May 2, 2007

I have written a post about "What can be learned about Cybers from tags? or: Multiple personality in the net?" I have tried to put some psychological inputs (i am a social pychologist) into it see http://www.trendsspotting.com/blog/?p=97, best, Taly