Chapter 3. Some History

Flickr, a photography-sharing web site that caters to bloggers, was the first web site to use something called a tag cloud. However, tag clouds really have their roots in the blogging community. Bloggers have a need to organize the large amounts of material they constantly churn out, and an excellent communications medium to propagate new and interesting methods.

Flickr's tag cloud idea was likely inspired (directly or indirectly) from an older blog plugin called Zeitgeist (Figure 8), by Jim Flanagan.