Logarithmic Tag Clouds

may 30, 2009

Tag clouds are a pretty popular way of displaying and indexing data, but they’re not without their faults. I added a tag cloud to a helpdesk system I created and while it works well, it eventually suffered from a common tag cloud problem: one tag had been used much more frequently than the other and the resultant cloud had one big tag and a million tiny tags. The way to solve the problem is through weighting the data.

A popular way of weighting the data is to apply a logarithmic scale to the data. Google turns up a bunch of different ways to accomplish this, but I’m not satisfied by any of them. Most solutions rely on grouping the data into steps, and performing a …

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