I must be the only webmaster in the world who doesn’t jump for joy, drool and watch my tongue roll out of my mouth at the mere site of a tag cloud. They’re boring, quite frankly stupid when compared to just typing in a search term. OMG is that even possible? or Maybe I should really be saying OMG OMG OMG That’s so 2005! In my best teenage girl impersonation.
On a more serious note, they are a headache to manage for bloggers and webmasters. On forums for instance 10 different people will enter 10 different tags for the same topic, that negates any helpful qualities of having BIGGER words for frequent topics. On blogs, you may slightly alter the same tag from post to post, maybe one time you hyphenate or pluralize it that creates an extra tag and negates the potential SEO value by adding an extra, useless page thereby the could be harmful, page stuffing comes to mind.
It could be that I’m bitter since when WordPress released built in tagging support I went tag crazy and deleted all my blog categories which lead to all of my permalinks becoming defunct. My fault, I know but all of those posts wound up at Big Dan’s Archive. WordPress categories are just like tags only more flexible for SEO purposes (think mod_rewrite + category descriptions)? I’m sure a plugin could be written to show a tag like cloud for categories since WP already stores the number of posts in each category.
You see I think tag clouds are the most annoying part of Web 2.0, aside from Web 2.0 being called “Web 2.0″ of course. Hello it’s the internet, technology is constantly evolving. You don’t see Apple calling the 3rd generation iPod “iPod 3.0″ or “iMac 4.0″ nope it’s simple iPod or video iPod, or it’s just a 24″ iMac. Really are webmasters that bored that we need to make up retarded names for almost new or combination (think Ajax) technologies. Of course every one uses these terms even traditional media which makes it all the more annoying.
Another term, I’ve grown to hate is “Social Network” Answer me this is there any of the kind networking other than computers that isn’t social? Business networking is social, school networking is social, hunting buddies are social networking. Do we really need this god awful term? The only thing that makes any sense is a spin off of “social networking”; social bookmarking because it’s new, traditionally we never made our bookmarks public maybe an email link to a friend here and there but not a public list of all your favorite sites, I think that’s pretty cool.
Anyway, back to tags, tagging, and that annoyance:
My question to you tag addicted folks is what’s so great about them, other than the potential to look at a cloud on a website and see the more common topics? For me, I’ll only use tags when a clickable tag cloud is available on the new post page so that I may add existing tags with out adding similar useless tags.
