One particular toy is a Flash tag cloud, which takes tags that have been applied to each blog post – for this post, for instance, I’ve used the tags “WordPress”, “Design” and “non-essentials” – and puts them into a “cloud” that moves about and can be played with – with the tags that have been used more often having a stronger font/size.  Adding Flash to this enables a pretty, gently moving cloud of the tabs, so:

Which is very lovely and fun, but…  it’s going to take your attention away from what I’d like you to be reading, learning, knowing – which is, of course, what you want you are here to read, learn, know!  Getting side-tracked by cool tools is not what you’re here for (well, not too much) and is wasting your valuable time.   So I’ll stick with the simple tag listing (still called a cloud) that comes as a standard widget option – boring but it isn’t distracting you while still being useful!

Edit: another thing is that some of your readers/visitors may not be able to see your pretty things anyway.  For instance, I cannot see this tag cloud, despite upgrading Flash and checking on other browsers than my favourite Firefox.  So another good reason to keep it simple.

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