Tag Cloud Generators and Plugins Round Up

Tag clouds, a cool feature or just another annoyance?
The answers are as many as there are plugins and Tag Cloud generator sites.

A staple of Web 2.0, tag clouds have been around for several years and much like fashion seem to have lost their favor (with some) and gotten some of it back, all in a very short span of time.

If you’re new to tag clouds the best way to explain the concept is “data labeling”.
While “data labeling” sounds boring, if done nicely and with a bit of fun, tag clouds can be a way of sorting out information for users or even a nice design element.
Taken to the extreme a tag cloud can even serve as the landing page of a site, though this may not make the site cooler or more user friendly.

From a software or coding or “back end” perspective, tag clouds work in one of several ways:
They sort the information alphabetically, by order of importance or popularity, or even not at all (as in no sorting at all).

So, if you are considering the issue of tag clouds or even want to upgrade from what you have to a new one, here is a list of several sources of tag clouds:

Tag Clouds for WordPress

Our first offering is a Flash based tag cloud that is very popular and really stands out. There are not too many Flash based clouds and they do stand out, so it seems right to start with Flash based Tag Cloud.

Here is a more standard Cloud.

A very stylish Tag Cloud with words going in all directions.

Any one for Poetry Tag Clouds?

Non WordPress cloud tag creators:

And finally here is a very cool gallery of even more tag clouds over on flickr.