I thought this could make for a rather interesting discussion as it's something i've been thinking about for a site i'm redesigning.

Basically, how do you view tag clouds, both from a design (aesthetic) perspective and from a userability perspective?

Personally i've come to the conclusion that tag clouds aren't particularly 'useful', to a user at least, some sort of category list is a far more user friendly section to have on a site.

However, if done correctly I think tag clouds can be excellent for improving the look and feel of a site, having some of your most important words spread out in a cloud like fashion immediately lets the user know what your sites about and if done well with good contrast between colours it can look great and really round of your design, away from the usual lists and boxes that most sites are made up off.

SEO is obviously another great advantage, after all who doesn't want some of their top keywords appearing on every page of their site?

Although personally i've decided against actually getting the top tags and instead have hard coded my keywords into the cloud, with the main ones bigger etc, purely because I trust my own knowledge of the important stuff more than what the most popular tags are (there's also the fact that just because i've got alot of something doesn't mean it's the most important thing on my site).

However i've also thrown in some keywords which aren't AS important, but i'd like to rank higher on in order to help boost me up the search engines, something which clearly my content isn't doing for those particular keywords.

So yeah, after some thought and some experimenting i've come the conclusion to use tag clouds for SEO and Visual Pleasure over anything, which obviously contrasts from the usual navigational tags that clouds seem to have been designed for originally.

But yeah, what are your thoughts on Tag Clouds, do you use them? If not, why not, if so how so and once again why?

I rather like the way that the WordPress theme Prologue uses tags through it's latest projects widget. It displays a list of the last x number of tags.

All too often a tag cloud seem to be information overload and I too prefer the order of a list.

I'm now tending to think, as far as blogs are concerned that categories are for divisions of content such as site news, templates, projects etc. and tags are identifying sub-divisions within those divisions such as 1 column, 2 column, green, blue etc.

I provide one on my site both as a tool for me to see what topics I'm focusing on (because I can't remember everything I've done in the year + since I've had the site) and to let people know what topics I favor.