Tag clouds can be used effectively, and provide real value to a web site, or they can be tacked on as an afterthought, simply because they look cool, or to make the site appear similar to other, better web sites that offer them. Ultimately, you need to keep in mind their dual function, both as a graph of current activity, and as a navigation aid. Here are some design and implementation tips:
I like to write code in lots of different languages, and I believe in choosing the right language for a particular job (rather than using any one language for all jobs). I think higher-level scripting languages like Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby are all good choices for making tag clouds. They tend to be supported on servers and they have associative lists (which make counting tags much easier). Lower-level languages that don't support associative arrays (such as C++ or Java) are not as good for implementing tag clouds, because you will end up writing considerably more code.
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