At var­i­ous times dur­ing the last year, I’ve heard a librar­ian here and there say that tags and tag clouds are a pass­ing fad, some­thing our patrons don’t even know about let alone use, and use­less com­pared to struc­tured search.

How­ever, think­ing that tags are only about clas­si­fi­ca­tion (good or bad) is miss­ing the for­est for the trees. Tag clouds can also be use­ful as nav­i­ga­tion tools and for pat­tern recog­ni­tion. Which is the name of Jason Griffey’s blog and must be why Jason helps prove this point.

2008 State of the Union as Tag Cloud

“Last year’s 2007 State of the Union Tag Cloud was such a hit, I decided to fol­low up again this year. A few major dif­fer­ences: Con­gress is men­tioned a lot more this year, while health and oil don’t show up at all. This year’s address looks more active…instead of ‘fight’ we get ‘fight­ing.’ ” [Pat­tern Recog­ni­tion]