Tag cloud history goes back to the yearly 90 tees. When the first English language weighted list was used in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs (1995) and in German language if happened even several years earlier. From the year of 2005 the popularity of tag clouds raised up quickly due to the overwhelming impact of search engine optimization process.
Today tagging is the process of labeling data with related keywords. The basic idea of tag clouds is to represent tags according to their meaning, their weight and their frequency relatively to other tags. This is done with appropriate font sizes and colors. The more important a tag is, the bigger and louder it appears (or at least should appear).
Tag clouds are often considered as one of the typical design elements in Web 2.0. However it's possible that the concept is recently loosing its popularity. Over the last years many sites used the technique, because they wanted to look “smashy”, although they really weren't. This resulted in unusable and boring designs, supported by the quick'n'dirty-tagging. The best example are probably Technorati's tag clouds which have a number of repetitions, sometimes have spam and basically consist of mainstream and irrelevant terms.

Discussions about Tag cloud history:
LEWIS GARY (Video blog script) says:
I have heard that some prominent bloggers have already removed tag clouds from their sites.

ROBINSON TIMOTHY (Video journal software) says:
Well it depends on who your trying to please – SEO or visitors. Chris is saying have categories as it's easier to manipulate the data but don't have category pages as it dilutes the link juice of the actual pages. I understand this, yet people leaving comments want visitors to be able to see all of the pages.
Having all page links in the footer, however, would not decrease link juice as they would be the actual page links, not category links which link to those specific pages.

WALKER JOSE (Fishing news and stories) says:
Man, bloggers have really started to frustrate me with their insanely long list of categories. Obviously, not too many IA specialists out there. But it shouldn't take an IA expert to know that usability is severely hindered when you provide too much choice. Repeat after me: Categories are not tags! As for link juice and SEO: satisfy users first, and the engines will follow.

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