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The adoption of tagging, which is really just cataloging by civilians, strikes me as one of the most interesting aspects of the collaborative web. People appreciate the need for controlled vocabulary, consistency, and tagging for retrieval as well as description. What I find intriguing is how quickly the idea of a tag cloud was adopted. We info pros have had the capability to generate word-frequency counts for decades, but word frequencies didn't catch on as a tool in the fee -based services to refine, expand, and clarify a search until the last couple of years.
Enter Search Cloudlet (http://searchcloudlet.com), which offers not just a tag cloud of search results but a cloud of sources mentioned in the news, the most frequently appearing domains in a search result, or the most common Twitter hash tags for a concept. Search Cloudlet is both a Firefox browser add-on and a (more limited) website. The site runs your query on Google and displays a tag cloud above the search results. The Firefox add-on, which can be downloaded at http://getcloudlet.com, extends the cloud functionality to web and news search results from Google and Yahoo!, as well as Twitter search results.
First, a small quibble about terminology. "Tags" usually refer either...