A Tag Cloud Widget for your Blog

Tags are a great way to bubble up useful nuggets of information. They tend to expose the true essence of a blog’s content in a short and concise fashion.

We have looked at many of the tag cloud widgets that exist today around the web, but were not completely satisfied with what we found. In most of the existing tag cloud implementations, the blogger is required to tag each post manually with lots of tags/categories. While this is generally a good thing (because the blogger knows best what her post is about), this basic requirement alienates the vast numbers of bloggers who don’t individually tag each post. Further, it’s possible a blogger missed some useful tags while tagging the post herself. We realized that a tag cloud widget that solved some of these problems could provide a great deal of utility.

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Wowzio’s new Tag Cloud widget…a smarter and more interactive tag cloud widget.

We spent a great deal of time thinking about how to make tag clouds simple to implement for bloggers. A feature we added that goes a long way to make tag clouds easy is the ability to auto-extract useful tags from each post for you. We used Yahoo’s Term Extraction Api to do this (of course we still also use the tags provided by the blogger).

Secondly, we wanted to improve on the experience of using a tag cloud. To create as smooth an experience as possible, when someone clicks on a tag inside our tag cloud widget, we display the matching articles in the widget itself (instead of going to a new page for each tag). This allows a user to explore several tags in one session, and increases the likelihood that they read another article.

We have architected our systems so that the tag cloud widget is rendered in sub-second time. The computationally heavy work of extracting tags and re-computing after every new post takes place on our backend servers. This way, when a user's browser requests a tag cloud, a Wowzio web server returns it right away.

Like all Wowzio widgets, the color scheme and size can be completely customized, to make the Wowzio Tag Cloud widget look like an integral part of your blog.

Please take a look at it, and provide us with your invaluable feedback!