Tag Clouds: Past, Present and Future

With the increase in popularity of collaborative tagging systems like Del.icio.us and Flickr, the need for an effective method to visualize information in these systems has become paramount. A tag cloud being currently the most popular and user-friendly interface provides insight into the information space of a collaborative tagging system but has several inherent limitations, resulting in some serious challenges in effective retrieval of relevant content. This paper initially presents a survey of the ongoing research efforts in evolving tag clouds from first generation of static nature to dynamic and more interactive second-generation interfaces. It further elaborates on the analysis of tag cloud design issues. It concludes with a set of recommendations for the design of next-generation visual interfaces to collaborative tagging applications. This work will prove useful to researchers who aim to design interfaces for information retrieval in folksonomy-based applications which satisfy users’ need for least cognitive load.