OPEN

Everyone’s been very excited by a site called Brandtags lately. Keeping the concept beautifully simple, Brandtags asks people to submit words and phrases that come into their heads when confronted with a series of logos.

It then creates a tag-cloud (you know the drill – the more often a word’s mentioned, the larger it is) that gives you a snapshot of what people say.

As you can see from the tip of the BBC‘s tag-cloud, the sample may be biased to the US slightly with “accents” and “awesome” being two key words that have been associated with the corporation.

Some people describe it wrongly and think it is pulling tags in from blogs and forums etc. Watch out for that… this is very interesting and a great eye-opener, a tease that begs people to ask what people are saying elsewhere out there on the social web.

Anyhow, here’s a site I’ve come across that is doing a similar thing but visualising – I think – the most common tags associated with a word when people tag a photo on Flickr as planets orbiting

It’s called Tag Galaxy. Here’s the tag planetary system for Xbox. No surprises there, but a neat visualisation of how important Halo is as a title.

And Brighton….

Yep – nor are there surprises there really… People are taking shots of the sky, the seaside, the pier. Nice.

It’s a bit of fun really – but I do like the interface. We quite often use nodes from network maps at iCrossing to visusalise / illustrate the scale of, for instance, attention, between different web-pages or brands. The similarity to planets is a metaphor we often use (“If the NYT is Jupiter, we’re a about the size of Sputnik on this topic…”).

I say a bit of fun, it’s actually a diploma thesis project by Steven Wood at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences Nuremberg. Hope it works out for you, Steven…

* * Update: Thanks to Brand Tags creator Noah Brier for popping by in the comments to let us know there’s a UK version of Brand Tags. I think it will be hard to divide the two out (I’ve input 50 or so tags on the US version before I heard of the UK edition)… but could be interesting nonetheless.