Embodiments of the present invention address deficiencies of the art in respect to the visual display of tags and provide a method, system and computer program product for contributor characteristic based tag clouds. In an embodiment of the invention, a tag cloud generation method can include loading tags for resources in a social bookmarking system, determining a personal characteristic for each of the end users applying the tags to the resources, and rendering a tag cloud for the tags based upon the personal characteristic of the end users and not based upon the frequency of use of the tags alone.