Tagging and folksonomies have become a new way to label, categorize, archive and find things on the net.

A tag is like a keyword that relates to an object or item. In this case, it relates to an article that uses - somewhat frequently - that particular term (the "tag").

Sites like Flickr (pictures), Technorati (blogs), Del.icio.us (bookmarks), Last.fm (music) and many others allow users to "tag" their content, find similar objects by searching for tags, etc. as well as display tag clouds where users can see in a visually appealing way a collection of tags somewhat emphasized by using different colors or sized fonts (the bigger the font, the more relevant or popular the tag is), that lead to a list of objects or items associated with those tags.

With ZoomClouds you can put small (or large) tag clouds on your website that relate to whatever is going on in your website.

And because you have control regarding the look and feel of the cloud, you will be able to enhance the content and appearance of your page with minimal effort and no cost to you, and at the same time, provide your visitors with an appealing way to see what terms are more often mentioned in your website.

You can use ZoomClouds to keep track of things other than what's going on in your site. You can build tag clouds out of any feed you like. For example, in our Featured Clouds section you can see some clouds built out of news websites, popular blogs, etc.

• Powerful content analisys tools
  ZoomClouds uses two different powerful content analisys tools. One of them extracts possibly relevant terms. The other not only grabs the most relevant terms but also becomes smarter over time, learning from the terms previously extracted - or rejected. So if your cloud doesn't look too sharp at the beginning, just give it some time.

• Complete visual interface
  A complete and very easy to use visual interface will help you design the look of your cloud any way you want without even having to write one single line of code. You can, of course, manually edit the CSS code at will if you want, but usually you won't have to.

  With the visual editor you can select how many tags you want in your cloud, the minimum and maximum font sizes, tag colors, border colors and width, hover colors, padding, background colors, whether you want the weight of the tags to appear next to them, draw (or not) a dot between tags...

• Extended visual options
  If the visual editor lets you design all the most important visual aspects of your cloud without you having to mess up with CSS code, by using what we call extra commands you can further customize how you want your cloud to look like: sort by weight instead of A-Z, assign random colors, show one tag per line (that is, show a list, not a cloud), word-wrap the tags, etc

• Comprehensive Statistics
  See how many clicks your tags are getting by the hour, by day, week, month or year. Get reports to see what tags were clicked the most and from what countries those clicks were made.

• Exclude unwanted tags
  For every cloud (or for all of them) you can enter a list of unwanted tags, that is, tags that you simply don't want to see in your tag cloud no matter what.

• Teach ZoomClouds what's really important
  Similarly, you can also enter a list of terms that you definitely want in your tag cloud but that ZoomClouds didn't catch. Add them, and ZoomClouds will never miss them again.

• Automatic and manual updates
  Automated updates when they're really needed. Other services do somewhat random periodic updates or have a "waiting list". ZoomClouds takes into account when the clouds are being shown, and updates them accordingly. And of course, you can update your cloud any time you want.

• Up to date information
  You can see when it was the last time your clouds were updated, and you can update them any time you want.

• Time-sensitive clouds
  You decide - not us - whether you want your cloud to reflect what's trendy during just the last 24 hours, or the last 3 days, 7 days, one month, and so on.

• Save your cloud designs
  You can save different cloud designs and apply them to whichever cloud you have at any time.

• Share cloud designs
  You can share your cloud designs (if you want) so other users can take a look at your cloud designs and perhaps even use them, and viceversa: you can look at other people's cloud designs and use them if you like.

• Extend the posibilities with the ZoomClouds API
  Take the results from your cloud - or any cloud - and do with them whatever you want: link the tags in your cloud with tags in Flickr and build a mosaic of Flickr pictures based in your tags. Or build a Flash app that does the unthinkable with the tags in your cloud, etc.

Anyway you like, but just to let you see some samples, take a look at these:

These are just some quick examples we prepared in just a couple of minutes. Yup, just a couple of minutes. You can customize the look of your tags that fast, without having to mess up with one single line of code!!

Want to see how easy to customize your tag clouds are? Check our demo!

Getting started is easy and takes less than a minute! Click here to sign up!

Clicking on a tag will display a page with a list of all articles associated with that tag and a small excerpt of the article (approximately 40-60 words), with a link to the original article at your website. Soon you'll be able to customize the headers and footers of that page, so users will still get a feeling of being at your site and not someone else's.

ZoomClouds is and will always be free. We might add a paid version in the future that would include features not available yet, but what you see today (and other things we plan to add soon) is and will continue to be 100% free.

At this point we do not include any kind of advertising anywhere.

We will never include ads in your tag clouds without your approval! If we ever offer such optional feature, it will be completely up to you, and as a way to share revenue with you. And if you'd rather keep your cloud ad-free, then your cloud will continue being ad-free for as long as you like, and for free of course, no strings attached of any kind.

ZoomClouds has been developed by Rogelio Bernal Andreo, aka RBA. Rogelio is also the person who developed eListas.net (largest email groups community in Spanish on the net with over 20 million registered users), ZoomGroups (Currently with over 900,000 registered users. Think of Orkut, Yahoo Groups, Blogger, eBay and a "tagged" version of adWords/adSense all integrated) and ZoomBlog (over 5,000 blogs created and actually part of ZoomGroups).

All these services, ZoomClouds included, are run by AR Networks, the company Rogelio co-founded in 1999, with offices in Sunnyvale, California and in Spain. Despite having been on business for over 5 years, AR Networks is still a "garage" company with barely half a dozen employees. Yet, it's been providing these and other services to millions and millions of people throughout these years, and continues to do so.

If you read the answer to the previous question you can see that we are used to provide services to a critical mass of users. Our first flagship service, eListas.net, is growing at a rate of 10,000 new users a day, and our latest "darling", ZoomGroups gets an average of 1,000 new users every day. We currently use a fleet of 18 dedicated servers for all of the services we provide.

At this moment, ZoomClouds is running out of a server, shared with ZoomGroups main server. ZoomClouds also shares the database server and file storage area with ZoomGroups. Just like any of our other services, ZoomClouds has been designed with scalability in mind, and just like we've been doing with all of our other services, should we ever anticipate the need to scale up the system, we will do it right away. It's not a matter of whether it's possible or difficult to do, but a matter of when does it make sense to do it.

While on the shared server, and as the word spreads out, there might be some peak moments - however, we are ready to act immediately should we notice a constant increasing demand for the service.

Beta is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. Zeta is the sixth.

In software, Beta usually means an unfinished product, whether feature complete or not, not fully tested, and so on. In this context, Zeta means the same as Beta but not so much as "behind". In the end, it means pretty much the same.

ZoomClouds is not a finished product, but what is? We label ZoomClouds to be in "zeta" stage because it's only been through internal QA testing and has only been exposed to over 20 outsiders for about two weeks - the official "beta" period - before being released out in the wild for anyone to play with it. We also label it "zeta" because it's not living yet in what ultimately will be its home: a pool of dedicated servers. Instead, it lives on a temporary home, sharing room and board with another service we have: ZoomGroups. (ZoomGroups actually uses 8 servers, it's just that one of them is being shared with ZoomClouds).

When ZoomClouds moves into its new home, when we finish adding a few more features, and when the service is being used by at least a few thousand users and we find it to be stable and as close as bug-free as we can, then we'll remove the "zeta" label and join the family of Zoom graduates.

Yes, we have an official ZoomClouds Blog, hosted at ZoomBlog of course :-)

We still have a lot of work to do there, but within a few days you should see us posting there not only the FAQ but also talking about current developments, future plans and so forth.

We were thinking to also launch an email list in ZoomGroups but since ZoomBlog lets you subscribe/join a blog via email - even receive comments by email and actually reply to posts and/or comments via email - we figured it'd be redundant, so we'll use the blog as the main communication center and then it's up to you whether you want to load up the blog on your favorite feed reader, join and participate by email, or just drop by the blog site whenever you like.