Here's a really cool idea...

You know how I love tag clouds? (See mine at the bottom of this page, if you are reading this on my blog). I have tried a few different tag cloud sites, and just switched from Zoomclouds (which suddenly stopped working, but was great before, with lots of customizable colors) to TagCrowd.

TagCrowd's website (which is incredibly simple to use) has a bunch of cool ideas for how you could use tag clouds:

* as topic summaries for speeches and written works
* for visual analysis of survey data
* as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world
* for data mining a text corpus
* for helping writers and students reflect on their work
* as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start
* as resumes in a single glance
* as visual poetry

The really cool idea that aught my eye is this one: you can use tag clouds as name tags for conference attendees. Here's an example.

The author of the post says, "I created a name tag for each professor by dropping their research statements and resumes into TagCrowd to create a cloud visualization of their interests, projects, collaborators and activities. It was a hit. The primary goal of these personal visualizations was to facilitate the formation of new collaborative research teams on the basis of shared interest. By making interests mutually visible when people meet each other for the first time, these “name tag clouds” can identify areas of overlap, complementary expertise, and opportunities for potential collaboration — all in a brief glance. They also serve as conversational props that ease the introduction process: the clouds present conversants a rich set of topics for inquiry. Looking around the room at any given time I witnessed circles of intellectual elites huddled intimately together, pointing playfully at one another’s clouds." Cool or what!! Here's his own tag cloud name tag.

Now, obviously, you would need enough information to drop into TagCrowd to actually create the cloud with, so this would work better for some associations than others, but I think this idea rocks. You could also do it for participants of online courses, too, for example, which might enable those participants to get to know one another much more easily than trying to remember (or completely ignoring) the three lines of bio that they include in their course profiles.

Give me ten minutes, I bet I could come up with a whole bunch of other ideas for tag clouds...!