Can I have multiple tag cloud for different sections in the site - eg - for my different blogs I’ll use one common tag cloud and for my recommended sites section I’ll use a different tag cloud?
It depends exactly what you mean, but you can definately create multiple instances of the Tag Cloud.
The control over which Tags show up in the cloud though, are controlled by the parameters you specify. For example, if you use the weblog="” parameter, it will filter out all other Tags that ONLY belong to entries in other Weblogs than that which is specified.
Same goes for Categories.