Tag Clouds

What’s a tag cloud? It’s a visualization of the tags that are used in your blog posts. As you can see to the right, this is the tag cloud for my SQLServerCentral blog. It can be hard to read, but a few things stand out in the cloud. “SQLSaturday” and “SQLServerCentral” as well as “T-SQL” are all fairly large.

About two years ago I was looking through this cloud and noticed that my tag cloud featured these tags are the largest:

• business
• e-readers
• energy
• SQLServerCentral

That was interesting to me. I hadn’t realized that I spent so much time on those topics. I had expected that I was writing about SQL Server more.

So I made a few changes. I started a business blog, and moved more business focused posts there. I also moved the energy and reading stuff more to my personal blog. I also started to focus more on T-SQL writing, trying to both keep up my skills as well as ensure that I was actually including T-SQL information in my blog. I still want to be seen as a DBA, so I made sure to focus there.

I think that a tag cloud is a great way to better understand yourself, and understand what you’re writing about. Or maybe, what you’re not writing about.

As an FYI, here’s a blogspot tutorial for a tag cloud.