what are tags?

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It's a tag cloud.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud

A tag cloud (more traditionally known as a weighted list in the field of visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.
The first widely known tag cloud appeared on Flickr, the photo sharing site. That implementation was based on Jim Flanagan's Search Referral Zeitgeist, a visualization of web site referrers. Tag clouds have also been popularised by Technorati, among others.
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Err the wikipedia explaination doesn't help

maybe because its 1am or maybe because it's too mumbo jumboy but what is it in simple language?

Flickr? never heard of it. Is that a typo for flicker?

a tag cloud is a list of words tagged with more weighted tags in larger letters. riiiiiiiiiight. tagged by whom? tagged from where? taged in what way?
 
Flickr is a photo sharing site:

www.flickr.com

They were bought by Yahoo not too long ago.

Users tag pictures there. So a picture of the sun would be tagged "sun". Then later when someone else searched for sun, or clicked on the word sun in a tag cloud that picture would come up.

A blog tag cloud would probably have to do with categories. So if you had a "category x" it would appear in the cloud as "category x" and when you clicked it all the posts from that category would come up. If you had 100 posts in "category x" and hardly any posts in other categories then "category x" would be in really big font compared to everything else.

Not sure if I'm explaining this well, but hopefully that helps.
 
capitalistpig said:
Tags really are really just categories. I guess it's a new web 2.0 thing.
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There you go, that's a better explanation than my long winded one.
 
Categories displayed in a non linear format then?

Interesting. Would you say it was a more user friendly approach?

Flickr is a photo sharing place? Cool. Will check them out too.
 
Nathan said:
Categories displayed in a non linear format then?

Interesting. Would you say it was a more user friendly approach?
Click to expand...

Just a different way of ranking the density of subjects. Bigger font = more stuff in that category. Bigger fonts tend to jump out more to people than an ordered list I guess.
 
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