Word clouds provide a visual blast of information and break down the popularity of various topics in an easy-to-read way. Here, the words represent things that are being discussed on our site – and the bigger the word, the hotter the topic. The technology works by using  ’tag words’ tapped in by the writer of each submission describing the content of their post; once these are ‘planted’ in the site then the words in the cloud start to grow.

Word clouds have been storming cyberspace this year. The BBC used a wordcloud to examine the frequency of different words used by George Bush during his eight-year presidency (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7813432.stm) and CNN created a word cloud to show what President Obama said to the press in March this year (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/03/25/obamas-press-conference-in-clouds/), making news around the world.

There is something fascinating about looking at words in a different way and we hope you find our word clouds visually interesting – and useful. We have also added something different and ground-breaking to our MAB clouds: ours are largely ‘clickable’ and will take you through to the parts of the site you need making them an intrinsic part of our website design.