Tag clouds as social signallers

Tag clouds are becoming increasingly popular visualisation and interaction techniques used on the web today. At the same time, tag clouds have been shown to have somewhat limited capabilities and usefulness. The generation of personalised tag clouds provides the ability to test how the enjoyment and engagement of an online social environment can be increased, as well as the ability to examine what benefits adding additional social information to tag clouds would have. A prototype system was developed that allowed differently configured tag clouds to be compared side-by-side. This research contributes an understanding into the feasibility of increasing the social awareness provided by tag clouds, and shows that there is potential for improving the usefulness of tag clouds by including additional social awareness information in these clouds. Copyright the author(s) and CHISIG.