Tag Clouds can create perfect semantic fields and it is possible to understand more about the author (in case of blogs), the main idea of website and the spirit of the community (in case of portals or social networking sites).
Also semantic fields can be used to explain for the customer why in the hell he needs Tag Cloud in the first place.
Provided that blog is written by the same person and the person has more or less stable area of interests and is using tags in proper way: it should be possible to create one mental image, which would define the blog. On the other hand, if person tags posts according to things he wants to show (or tries to manipulate you) – still you will get some kind of understanding what drives her.
While it is easy to influence creation of tag clouds for one person blog, it is much more difficult to manipulate it if the blog is written by different (independent) persons and almost impossible to do it if tag clouds are created on the fly in social networking sites (of course – if data is not tampered with).
Also this reminded me a friend, who is doing text analyzes for SEO, basically what he does is extracting semantic field from the text an analyzes if it contains keywords which he requires. If not – the text is rewritten in such way, that semantic field matches keywords.
I have started to think about the tool, which creates Tag Clouds by counting repetitions of words and creating a cloud for an article or for a blog. Now just there is a need to find a perfect formula..
