"Washington University" Topic Cloud

About the Topic Cloud View

A Topic Cloud^® provides a simple view of important keywords and key-phrases used in a blogsite.  The topic cloud view makes it easy to identify subjects that are discussed in the blogsite—frequently discussed subjects are presented in larger type and brighter colors while seldom-discussed subjects are represented more subtly.

The top-level cloud provides a high-level view of the subjects discussed in the blogsite.  Simply click on a specific word or phrase to focus your search.  As you drill into a subject area, the cloud may become smaller or larger depending on the granularity of your search.  At every point, however, you have direct access to related blogsite content in the lower portion of your browser window.

About the Tag Taxonomy View

The tag taxonomy view shows a family of related keyword and key-phrases (i.e., "tags") mentioned in the blogsite.  This view helps you discover and navigate between related subject matter.  This becomes increasingly valuable as the number of search results grows.

To illustrate, consider the following scenario.  Imagine that a weblog author tagged a particular posting with "market communication blogsite".  The tag taxonomy would show how this key-phrase is related to other phrases such as, "market communication", "communication blogsite", and others.  Further imagine another author tagged a different post with "project management blogsite".  Like "market communication blogsite", this phrase is related to the more general phrase "blogsite" (and others).

Now, if you drilled into (i.e., searched) the topic cloud for the term "blogsite", the results would include the two items described above and, perhaps, others.  If the number of results were small, you could simply browse the available results.  On the other hand, if the number of results were large, you could use the tag taxonomy view to browse results classified into related subject groupings.  For example, under "blogsite" you would see that there are results for "market communication blogsite", "project management blogsite", and possibly others.

Using the taxonomy view as your guide, you can quickly focus your inquiry on subjects of interest.