With ZoomClouds you can put small (or large) tag clouds on your website that relate to whatever is going on in your website.
And because you have control regarding the look and feel of the cloud, you will be able to enhance the content and appearance of your page with minimal effort and no cost to you, and at the same time, provide your visitors with an appealing way to see what terms are more often mentioned in your website.
Main Features..
- Powerful content analisys tools
ZoomClouds uses two different powerful content analisys tools. One of them extracts possibly relevant terms. The other not only grabs the most relevant terms but also becomes smarter over time, learning from the terms previously extracted - or rejected. So if your cloud doesn't look too sharp at the beginning, just give it some time. - Complete visual interface
A complete and very easy to use visual interface will help you design the look of your cloud any way you want without even having to write one single line of code. You can, of course, manually edit the CSS code at will if you want, but usually you won't have to.With the visual editor you can select how many tags you want in your cloud, the minimum and maximum font sizes, tag colors, border colors and width, hover colors, padding, background colors, whether you want the weight of the tags to appear next to them, draw (or not) a dot between tags...
- Extended visual options
If the visual editor lets you design all the most important visual aspects of your cloud without you having to mess up with CSS code, by using what they call extra commands you can further customize how you want your cloud to look like: sort by weight instead of A-Z, assign random colors, show one tag per line (that is, show a list, not a cloud), word-wrap the tags, etc - Comprehensive Statistics
See how many clicks your tags are getting by the hour, by day, week, month or year. Get reports to see what tags were clicked the most and from what countries those clicks were made. - Exclude unwanted tags
For every cloud (or for all of them) you can enter a list of unwanted tags, that is, tags that you simply don't want to see in your tag cloud no matter what. - Teach ZoomClouds what's really important
Similarly, you can also enter a list of terms that you definitely want in your tag cloud but that ZoomClouds didn't catch. Add them, and ZoomClouds will never miss them again. - Automatic and manual updates
Automated updates when they're really needed. Other services do somewhat random periodic updates or have a "waiting list". ZoomClouds takes into account when the clouds are being shown, and updates them accordingly. And of course, you can update your cloud any time you want. - Up to date information
You can see when it was the last time your clouds were updated, and you can update them any time you want. - Time-sensitive clouds
You decide - not them - whether you want your cloud to reflect what's trendy during just the last 24 hours, or the last 3 days, 7 days, one month, and so on. - Save your cloud designs
You can save different cloud designs and apply them to whichever cloud you have at any time. - Share cloud designs
You can share your cloud designs (if you want) so other users can take a look at your cloud designs and perhaps even use them, and viceversa: you can look at other people's cloud designs and use them if you like. - Extend the posibilities with the ZoomClouds API
Take the results from your cloud - or any cloud - and do with them whatever you want: link the tags in your cloud with tags in Flickr and build a mosaic of Flickr pictures based in your tags. Or build a Flash app that does the unthinkable with the tags in your cloud, etc.
At this point they do not include any kind of advertising anywhere. If they ever offer such optional feature, it will be completely up to you, and as a way to share revenue with you. And if you'd rather keep your cloud ad-free, then your cloud will continue being ad-free for as long as you like, and for free of course, no strings attached of any kind.
Anyway you like, here are some samples:
Beta is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. Zeta is the sixth.
In software, Beta usually means an unfinished product, whether feature complete or not, not fully tested, and so on. In this context, Zeta means the same as Beta but not so much as "behind". In the end, it means pretty much the same.
ZoomClouds is not a finished product, but what is? They label ZoomClouds to be in "zeta" stage because it's only been through internal QA testing and has only been exposed to over 20 outsiders for about two weeks - the official "beta" period - before being released out in the wild for anyone to play with it.
They also label it "zeta" because it's not living yet in what ultimately will be its home: a pool of dedicated servers. Instead, it lives on a temporary home, sharing room and board with another service they have: ZoomGroups. (ZoomGroups actually uses 8 servers, it's just that one of them is being shared with ZoomClouds).
When ZoomClouds moves into its new home, when they finish adding a few more features, and when the service is being used by at least a few thousand users and they find it to be stable and as close as bug-free as they can, then they'll remove the "zeta" label and join the family of Zoom graduates.
Within a few days you should see them posting not only the FAQ but also talking about current developments, future plans and so forth.
Apparently they were thinking to also launch an email list in ZoomGroups but since ZoomBlog lets you subscribe/join a blog via email - even receive comments by email and actually reply to posts and/or comments via email - it'd be redundant, so they'll use the blog as the main communication center and then it's up to you whether you want to load up the blog on your favorite feed reader, join and participate by email, or just drop by the blog site whenever you like.
Since the launch in June of 2005, TagCloud has registered over fourteen thousand users, kept track of around 120,000 website feeds, and peaked at over 6 million page views a month. And guess what.. that's all been done on ONE SINGLE SERVER!!
See, like many other great inventions in the Web 2.0 world apparently they never thought their little prototype experiment would turn into something as big as what TagCloud has become.
According to the founder John Herren..
We've enjoyed hearing so much positive feedback from our users, and we've loved the attention from the big boys like TechCrunch, Lifehacker, Wired, and Search Engine Watch. We've appeared on several Web 2.0 "best of" lists. We even got a chapter devoted to us in Yahoo! Hacks. A few months back we spoke at Under the Radar, and even won a prize at the first ever Mashup Camp. Yes, we've even had some folks copy our idea for their own service.
But since lately many people have written to TagCloud frustrated that we haven't been able to keep up with the demand, and they've been correct. Thus the founder goes on to say..
It's time to roll up our sleeves and make our site meet its demand. We're happy to announce that we are now sponsored by iWeb Technologies, a hosting company in Montreal. We're delighted that this will give us some much needed head room to scale our service.
Ok.. Here's the simplest explanation I could get my hands on..
Tags are a new style of search data that describe what each page or story on the site is about. The tag cloud is therefore a visual map of the content on a site. Normally tags that are large and bold are written about a lot, tags that are smaller have only been written about a few times.
Tags are a new form of information design pioneered by the most successful online communities. They offer another way to navigate content on a site, showing patterns, the scope of content available, and how popular different keywords are.
Some sites allow you to tag content with your own words, helping you organize and remember content that is relevant to you. And by sharing your tags with others, an evolutionary "wisdom of crowds" map is created, helping you and others find valuable signals within all the noise.