Tag clouds have become a frequently used interaction technique in the web in the past couple of years. Research has shown the influence of variables such as tag size and location on the perception of tag clouds. However, several questions remain unclear. First, little is know on how tag clouds are perceived visually and which search strategies users apply when looking for tags in a tag cloud. Second, there are variables, especially tag location, were prior work comes to conflicting results. Third, several approaches to present tag clouds with the tags semantically clustered have been proposed recently.
To say of Perception tag cloud it is very important that users are to put a given tag cloud in proper context in order to understand the cloud effectively. Their end may goals may be finding related items, surveying the thinking within a knowledge domain, identifying and contacting collaborators, or some other purpose, but it's essential for them to understand the tags in the cloud to achieve those goals. Thus whenever a user encounters a tag cloud, they ask and answer a series of questions intended to establish the cloud's context and further their understanding. Context related questions often include "Where did these tags come from? Who applied them? Why did they choose these tags, and not others? What time span does this tag cloud cover?" Context in this case means knowing enough about the conditions and environment from which the cloud was created, and the decisions made about what tags to present and how to present them.

Discussions about Perception tag cloud:
THOMAS MARK (Templates design) says:
Many tag clouds only have certain pre-set levels. I do believe that information should be available, and not just using CSS. My point here was not to show the ultimate tag cloud; rather, just that existing tag clouds could be made better and more semantic without altering how they are displayed to the user with CSS. Personally, I’m not that a big fan of tag clouds. But I am a fan of semantic markup. :)

HERNANDEZ DONALD (Websites for sale) says:
As for tag cloud mark-up, I agree completely with the analysis of existing mark-up. Technorati tried to be semantic but lost the plot a bit when they reached such deep nesting. That said, I’m not sure they’re completely wrong for using EM.
I think there are two distinct lines of thought for this. The first is that HTML does not have sufficient means to describe this cloud representation of tags and that therefore classes should be used on top of generic mark-up. The second is that HTML does not have sufficient means so we should use the closest matching mark-up we can find.

MOORE GEORGE (CMS software reviews) says:
Incidentally, it’s worth remembering that a 'tag cloud’ is actually a weighted list of tags. Weighted lists are a great example of information design: managing to convey lots of information in a very compact way. They are useful in contexts outside of tags too…

MARTIN KENNETH (Payment gateway) says:
I feel that there should be a little more control in the size of the text, perhaps a JavaScript solution that pulls the number of posts from an inner span and dynamically assigns a weight based on some thresholds, min size, max size etc.
The offset text is great for SEO.

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