I like technology and computers more than most. That said, I'm not a techie. I was inordinately pleased to be able to manage the widget-cut-and-paste for Library Thing. I'm just as pleased to have managed to add the Zoomcloud code to this page (see right hand sidebar).
From our friends at Wikipedia:
"A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.
The first widely known use of tag clouds was on the photo sharing website Flickr. That implementation was based on Jim Flanagan's Search Referral Zeitgeist, a visualization of web site referrers. Tag clouds have also been popularised by Del.icio.us and Technorati, among others.
The first published appearance of a tag cloud can be attributed to the 'subconscious files' in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs (1995)."