Brody, Budapest, Caramel, dance, Eurovision, funny, gypsy, Gyurcsany, Liszt, Megasztar, Pokolgep, rhapsody, sex, Showder - just a few examples of search terms that will come up with Hungarian videos on YouTube. Is that what Hungary means to the world? Or Speak, the "Hungarian rapper", whose first and so far only video has already been seen by several million people and whose video is the second entry if you search for "Hungarian" on the web.

The question was whether a nation can be profiled with the aid of thousands of short films, animations and adverts and whether this mass of films relates in any way to the keywords that describe them. It emerged that it is possible - but there's more to it.

Type a keyword into YouTube and you may end up with thousands of search results. How many film clips can you watch? Is there a way of cutting the results list down to size?

The keywords - or tags - are chosen by the people who have uploaded the videos. Our research, conducted between August and October 2007, focused on the results obtained by entering the English name for a nation into YouTube's search engine. We then used a program to collect a maximum of 1,000 videos and select all the tags attached next to them. The result is that, the more frequently a tag appears, the larger the typeface it is printed in. The most frequently-used tags are in a 32 point font, the least frequent in 10 point.

We then went through the tag list by hand, noticing that certain tags tended to appear in pairs. This was revealing - lion and king separately imply something different from lion king. Occasionally, tags would be popular but have no relevance to the nation in question - personal names, for example.

The tag cloud shows what a web surfer would have found in autumn 2007 if he or she had tried to get a picture of a nation via YouTube.

The Hungarian tag cloud contains the fewest foreign words. Most of the terms are English or Hungarians. The names - mostly those of singers, composers and pop groups - are well-known here in Hungary. The picture reflects the age group into which most web surfers and video uploaders fall and the kinds of stereotypes that surround Hungary (the csardas, Liszt, gypsy music, King Stephen), as well as the dominance of certain pop groups and television personalities.

This is quite surprising, given that YouTube is an alternative medium. We might have assumed that a community database like YouTube would give a more colourful picture of the nation, reflecting underground culture as well. Maybe this side of the country is represented in long tail, but the "shop window" (the first pages of results), does not reflect this. Civil society does not get much of a showing.

Tag clouds representing foreign languages and cultures seem less revealing - until you realise that chalga is a style of pop music in Bulgaria, while BBB is the name for hard-core supporters of Zagreb's Dinamo football club, that trubacsi is Serbian for trumpeter, and that Gucsa is the town where the country's largest trumpet festival is held. Srebrenica is well enough known not to need any explanation, and nor is the importance of Kosovo to Albania a mystery. Ukraine's Verka Serduchka recently enjoyed Eurovision success.

It's easy to work out the significance of these tags by entering them into the community-edited Wikipedia website. Take for example, a Ukraine tag cloud with links to Wikipedia to explain their significance.

2004 andrij_danilko ani_lorak army bach bessonova canada catholic christmas comedy culture cup dance eurovision festival folk football funny germany girls grytsay hiphop hopak hot kiev kyiv live love lviv model montreal mozart music muzyka new_order okean_elzy orange_revolution paganini partita poland pop rap rhythmic_gymnastics rock ruslana russia russian sexy shevchenko show singing ska soccer sofia_rotaru song st_elias tnmk traditional tv ukraina ukraine ukrainian ukrainians ukranian usa verka_serduchka via_gra video violin vopli war wild world xs young

Comparing the tag clouds for different countries, we find that the similarities are more revealing than the differences.

There are elements of different national characteristics in each tag cloud, but they all reflect certain broad categories of global culture. Most videos fit into the following categories:

Music: talent contests and the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), music videos.

The videos show us contestants in the Hungarian TV talent contest Megastar, the performance of the Romanian Eurovision candidate - but in almost all cases, national talent competitions and the pan-European competition predominate.

Sport: what we like and what we're best at. The tag clouds show that in the Yugoslav successor states and Italy, football is important. Elsewhere, skiing (Austria), ice hockey (Czech Republic) and fighting sports (Russia, Croatia) are of great significance.

Wars, armed forces, special forces, air force. Recent wars often feature (the Yugoslav succession wars in particular), as do defeats in the World Wars (Russians, Ukrainians), national contingents serving in global hotspots (Poles), continual preparedness (Turks, Irish), and in other cases technical preparedness (the Swiss airforce). War video games also feature regularly.

Crazy, funny, hot, sexy, humour. Take a camera, stand in front of it, and perform - a guaranteed success, especially if you're a girl, and you have blond hair and know how to smile engagingly. Or if you come up with a suitably extreme, unprintable or absurd script. If it's not funny, it doesn't matter - somebody will appreciate it somewhere.

Street culture, in both good and bad senses. Everything that happens on the street: dancing, music, sport and fighting.

Series, TV shows, cartoons. These crop up frequently, and tell you much about a people's attitudes. Most of the shows are foreign franchises. Cartoons make a big showing, with Disney productions and Japanese cartoons predominating.

A country's features, culture and beauty spots. These feature less frequently in the tag clouds, but touristic destinations always crop up. These include both professional short videos, amateur shots and home videos of excursions. Folklore is everywhere - whether folk pop, folk music, folk music or folk tales.

So, can we characterise a nation on the basis of film clips, music videos and animations and the tags they generate? To some extent. And yet the picture we form of those nations differ little from the stereotypes we already have in our heads. Clearly, we'd have to actually watch the films.

But the sample reveals real similarities. Differentiation is there, but within certain themes. The tag clouds reveal a nascent common European culture.

Iván Marinov