Someone posted this question to the Blogger user mailing list recently and here’s my response:
Tag clouds are a collection of tags and the idea is that instead of having categories, especially a short simple list of categories with perhaps only one assigned to each post, you can assign any number of tags to each post and give readers easier access to your archives. Tags are keywords and might otherwise be considered reasonably equivalent to categories.
Since Blogger does not support either it’s possible to put tags directly in the post body or else to manually tag each post to a service like delicious or RawSugar.
Personally I think clouds are a poor interface when the tagged content has more than a fairly small number of posts. A couple of good examples of fairly useless tag clouds are:
- DailyKos (compare it to this sample we worked up using RawSugar)
- WordPress.com (this is an aggregation of all the tags used by all the blogs on this hosted WordPress service, which is comparable to Blog*Spot)
BillSaysThis 