A lot of blogs or other types of sites with a lot of content use tag clouds, where trending words are shown and popular words are displayed larger. For example
Should you put a tag cloud on your site? Does it have a purpose, other than linking to more content from your homepage so search engines will find it? Does a tag cloud really have something to add UX-wise?
Answer
Some types of sites benefit from tag clouds. An example was an old version of www.torrentz.com. The tag cloud showed the most popular things being currently downloaded. With torrents, the popularity is proportional to download speed, so it's a win-win situation: you get good content really fast.
The reason why tag clouds don't work on other sites, such as blogs, may be a technical reason, not a user experience reason. Nearly all the blogs you visit are built on top stock content management systems (Blogspot, Wordpress). To be flexible and serve any type of blog, these CMSs merely do tag counts to determine the size of the tag in the cloud. The number of times a tag appears is really useless in determining its worth or popularity, so these tag clouds on blogs have really marred the regular user's perception of tag clouds in general.
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