As you're poking around the Social Signal web site, you might notice the cluster of red words in the right-hand sidebar. This cluster is called a "tag cloud". It represents all the tags that we use on this site: the keywords that we've assigned to different pages or blog posts to indicate what each story is about.
Our tag cloud is a visual representation of the range of content on the site. The tags that appear in the biggest letters are the tags that we write about a lot (like "SocialSignal" or "SocialBookmarking"). The smaller tags (like "blogher" and "workshops") link to topics that we've only written about once or twice.
You can click on any tag to see all the stories we've written about that topic -- so the tag cloud is a handy way to navigate the site, as well as a quick picture of what we're thinking about.
We decided to use a tag cloud as one of the main ways to navigate our site because tags are so central to the kind of work we do. For many of the projects we work on -- especially web projects that build online communities by linking multiple web sites -- tags are central to how information is organized, circulated, and discovered.
We think tagging is one of the most exciting ways for people to work together online. We hope that our tag cloud will be a fun way for you to explore how tagging works as a way to organize and link information thematically. And we hope you'll use our tag cloud to learn more about tags and about tag-enabled services like social bookmarking and del.icio.us.
