Tags the new disturbing web usability/readability trend

From what I have seen there is an emerging trend out there in the web world that should have readers and consumers of web content up in arms.  The problem lies between who the consumer of the content is.  However, the issue is not an old one just a different way of using and abusing web content to achieve the same goal.  Our culprit this time is not bold and underlined and linked text, or hidden blocks of keywords.  It’s worse, and has greater impacts on usability as well as readability.  The culprit is what I call the “Glutton Tag Cloud”.  It is a glutton for 2 reasons that both cause consumers problems.  First it eats up screen space with a bulging belly full of tags that in some cases reflect every word in the content as well as synonyms.  The content is left to a sliver of space looking like jack sprat in the corner and stretched out to cause plenty of scrolling.  One concession is that shorter lines do help scanning but excessively short lines also hurt reading.  Then of course there the second issue of becoming meaningless.  I would predict that if “Glutton Tag Clouds” continue to be out there Tags will soon go the way of the dinos.  Extinct as a manner of by which producers can categorize their creations for others so that consumers can find them. 

The reason issue number 2 is so important is based on that very word “important”.  When consumers look for content they are looking for content that addresses particular importance to a few key subjects.  The “Glutton Tag Cloud” on the page sits there to say that everything in this page is important.  The result of that will be that nothing will be considered important.  So when nothing becomes important the ability to rank relevance of the content based on the important topics goes away.  Once that happens The tag cloud will go away and another method of identifying importance or subject matter of content will show up to be exploited I guess.

I would have to think that if your content was that interesting it would not need the Glutton Tag Clouds to get it noticed.  People would find it easily using the system that has been defined.  Don’t go from a content creator to an SEO optimized relayer of garbage.  Keep it real and keep it fresh please.