There is a difference in the way some websites use popularity clouds. If your site has a lot of content to be discovered by the users you may want to have a special section for a tag cloud.

Popularity clouds (or tag clouds) are a way to show your audience what’s hot in your site. As a concept it has been around for some time and there is nothing new here. The could is made by hot tags your users have been using, the bigger the tag is displayed, the hotter the topic.

A good example is Flickr, the photo sharing website. They have the “Popular Tags” section on the Explore menu. This shows that the tag cloud is not a secondary feature on Flickr and might be something very popular that users like to use to discover popular photos.

A whole section for the tags…

The Flickr tag cloud…

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.