PETAC: from visualisation to personalisation of tag clouds

Tag clouds are relatively new, visual representations of tags - and are becoming increasingly popular on the web today. They have shown great potential for use as visualisation or interaction techniques; however, at the same time they have also been shown to be somewhat limited in regards to capabilities and usefulness. In contrast to many popular views on the usefulness of tag clouds, it has been suggested that their primary advantage may be for use as signallers of the social activity occurring within a system - as opposed to purely visualisations of data. Little work has been done on the generation of personalised tag clouds and their effect on increasing users' enjoyment and engagement with a system. We propose PETAC (PErsonal TAg Cloud), a system that allows differently configured tag clouds to be compared side-by-side. It was developed to examine the feasibility of increasing the social awareness information provided by tag clouds. Results show that there is potential for improving the usefulness of tag clouds by including additional social awareness information in these clouds.