Stupidest Web Feature Ever Created: Tag Clouds
techquilashots.com
techquilashots.com
It's a visualization. It's good for certain things. It's bad for others. I have seen tag clouds used very well, for example here:
One thing in favour of tag-clouds I've found is they are finer grained. If the knowledge domain is 'foo' you can quickly work out how the vocab is skewed to a particular subject. This is useful, unless they are spammed.
On the front page, maybe not. I tend to use the maps less regularly than every day. I check the entire vocab, not just the big words (though they do stick out). You're making a fair point though. I had the same beef with the ruby on rails image maps where they take up space & are indecipherable (to me anyway).
But I think the title and tagline of a blog is a better indication. A tag cloud is just a visual cacophony of symbols my mind tries to parse unsuccessfully. If I'm on a blog I haven't been to before it's generally because I came from here or google. In that case, I'm there for a specific keyword or reason already.
The big thing that really bugs me about tag clouds is when I click on one and it leads me to another. That's just not helpful.