A Text cloud is a visual display of the frequency of words constituting the text used in a speech presented in the form of weighted list. This technique is known as been recently used to visualize the main content of speeches of politicians. In the base of the text cloud it is possible to put any text (books, articles etc.). This for ex. could be some kind tag cloud as part of the layout, serving both as navigation and a quick way of visualising what the content is about.
Text cloud might be a more accurate label for these visualizations than tag cloud. Text clouds differ from tag clouds in composition (no tags at all) and purpose (predominantly comprehension, rather than access or navigation) - distinguishing the two types of clouds will make it much easier to assess their abilities to support user experience needs and business goals. The increase in the number and variety of specific text cloud tools reflects embrace and enthusiasm for text clouds in communities of interest for information visualization, language processing, and semantics.

Discussions about Text cloud:
BAKER JOSHUA (Dating video chat script) says:
I think that tagging works well when people tag "their" stuff, but it fails when they ask to do it to "someone else's" stuff.

ADAMS JERRY (Online dating) says:
Yes, there is a problem in that the tag cloud idea wasn't necessarily going to work getting tags from users. But it did work as a visual device- a really simple way of getting the overall flavour of content on any given page.

NELSON DENNIS (Cool fast cars) says:
And what about if to create the tag clouds with a help of the Flash or Java?

HILL WALTER (RED5 server) says:
This is our experience: we were chosing between two ways. The first would have been to simply style the content via CSS and Javascript, and the second was to use Flash. The advantage of Flash here is that it gave us a bit more freedom with regard to font, effects, and speed of production. The Javascript feeds this list of words into a Flash movie and we let Flash handle the weighting. We used Prototype to parse the list, and added it as a variable into the embed code.From there it is pretty straight forward. Flash randomises the array, calculates relative sizes of fonts, and generates our text cloud. The only tricky thing left to do is to resize the Flash content on the page to fit the height of it's content. We didn't want to limit the content author at all- if they want 5 words or 50 words, the Flash needs to deal with it gracefully. Again, this is handled with Javascript and Prototype. This means that the content editor doesn't need to worry about passing additional arguments to make it bigger for more text, and we can be sure the text cloud will look the way it's meant to look.

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