(Image copyright A. Barake 2009)
The tag cloud idea made popular by so many Web 2.0 sites has its origins in the humble index. It is another of Unix' achievements to have foreseen the potential for automation back in 1969. Unix contained tools for indexing, for inverted index generation and of course regular expression searching in aid of indexing. Unix is about text. Tags and tag clouds are about turning relational semantics on their head, and the tag cloud is a nice UI representation of the "index heat map", how frequent a hit occurs. Add the concept of hyperlinks and you have "Everything is Miscellaneous"
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