One of those really useful elements is ‘jcarousel’, wich you should know [I mean, if you came here from google searching for a 'working circular carousel'!!!] but lack of a full support for circular carousel.
The example in the official document needs the content loaded on-the-fly, not covering the most usual case, where the content is put into the markup [<ul> <li> sequence] and I found nowere a working example for such case. Since I had to figure i out how to make it work for a project I recently come across, here you go.

The idea is quite basic: you use the callback functions to create on the fly elements that you put in the hidden area before starting the animation; the only thing I changed respect the original example is that i use the jcarousel.get() method to get the content from the existing list instead of getting it from WWW, I also added auto start, pager and other nice features, but of course your need may be different.

make good use of this one!!

if yout blog really needs this kind of applet, well, it doesn’t really matters wether it is a 3d javascript object or a flash movie.

The only odd in the mentioned plugin is that you loose SEO opportunities, so, if you really, really, really, really want to try such thing, i’ve just come with a nearly fully functional  HTML only version of tht object. Just create your usual <ul><li> assign them the specific class (I’ll give you a hint… “tagcloud”) and call the proper constructor… on the mouseover all of youtr cloud will start to move around your layer.
There’s of course place to soo many customisazione, and the 3D functions that I’m using are still not perfect, so, if you come with a better version than mine, please let me know.

Update: after 6 onths from the original post, this is still the most visited btween all the other [5] post composing this blog. It makes me wonder if a javascript 3d library would be wellcome. something like a Prototype class or evena Jquery UI class… with a bit of tweaking and a little amount of css programming real fake 3d GUI elements could be created…

In the [real little] spare time I can give to this blog, I will try to create such library.