Ever since I first started seeing tag clouds on sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us I’ve been fascinated with them. What a great way to display ambient data in an easy to understand format. The basic idea is that links of more relevance are bolder and larger than those of less importance. Well, 1000tags.com is exploring the idea of the tag cloud further. 1000tags.com started on January 9 and is gaining popularity quickly. The idea is if you post a tag cloud on your site, then you get your own tag that gets displayed in a tag cloud elsewhere. 1000tags.com is also selling tags for those that are not interested in displaying a tag cloud.

In an attempt to increase readership and as a tag cloud endorsement, I’ve decided to give 1000tags.com a try. You can see my tag cloud at the botom of the right column, pretty spiffy, eh? If you have any experience with 1000tags.com please let me know what you think.

1000tags.com is posing some interesting questions such as, are tag clouds a good way to display sponsored links? I think the answer to that question is yes. The whole goal of sponsored links on a site is to display the most relevant sponsor to the content of that page. If you could use a tag cloud for such a display then you could represent relevance of sponsors and increase click through rate.