We here at Autodesk think they are. Sometimes a picture says more than a thousand words. And that is exactly what tag clouds are all about.
As you might or might not know Autodesk recently added tagging capability to its newsgroup posts. Everyone can add personal tags or (preferably) reuse existing tags.It allows you to highlight which topics are important to you and it allows us to easily spot the more popular ones. Here are the tag results that I recently collected from the Inventor newsgroup:
By removing the obvious tags (Help, Error, Problem, Drawing, Assembly, Part, File), we can easily get a more refined view of what is going on on the Inventor newsgroup.
Outside the obvious big 3 (Part, Assembly and Drawing), I think there is a need for information or trouble shooting in areas such as Sketching, Content Center, FEA, Vault, iLogic, Frame Generator, Excel, iPart and BOM. Especially the presence of Sketching in this list surprised me.
Here is the same tagging technique used on the categories of this Inventor blog.
By comparing the two clouds, we can make sure that the blog posts we create are relevant by matching them to the subject matter interest as formulated on the newsgroup.
I must admit that we haven't created any blog posts on Sketching yet (assuming that it was an easy to understand module of Inventor without too many problems). Maybe we need to revisit this approach and offer more sketch related articles.
Let us know what you think of this conclusion.
Bob