TagClouds: What if OPACs allowed a "Browse by Tags" feature?

I was suitably impressed the first time I saw how Tags were organised and presented from Technorati.com (this was quite some time ago). What impressed me was the simple combination of:

1. Arranging the words and terms in one paragraph, and
2. Varying the font-sizes to represent the popularity of a keyword/ tag.

Alone by themselves, aspect (1) and (2) was nothing fancy. But combine them and you get a simple and compact visual presentation.

Recently, I was introduced to Lee, who maintains a site theworldisnotflat.com. I came to his "Browse by Keyword" page. First time I've seen this arrangement used outside Technorati.com; thought it was a good idea and wanted to try it out for my blog.

Thanks to Kevin, whom I emailed to ask how this could be done, he introduced me to TagCloud.com. I signed up and quickly created my own Browse by Keyword url. You can also incorporate the cloud into the blog rather than a URL (instructions in the "Implementation Guide" section when you sign in).

Suggestions for TagCloud:

• Allow for longer 'Cloud names' (you might notice that my tagcloud URL is missing a "G");
• When creating clouds, create another option for user to specify the tags that go into the cloud. Currently, the cloud is automatically generated so it doesn't give me control over what terms to specify (other than specifying drop-words).

Then it hit me -- why not do the same for library online catalogues (OPACs) or websites? For instance:

• Allow the user to Browse by Keywords presented in a 'tag cloud' (this is in addition to the typical listing of keywords/ subject categories)
• Also, for the alphabetical listing of keywords/ subject categories, vary the font-size for popular tags

I'm going to throw this suggestion to my colleagues and see what they think. If you know of any library website (not librarian blogs) that has implemented the above features, let me know.

Tag: tagcloud, opac