tag clouds - ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/feeds/tag/tag clouds en Copyright 2009 Richard MacManus readwriteweb@gmail.com Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:04:58 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=4.23-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Track Hot Topics On Niche Blogs With FeedVis FeedVislogo.jpgWant to put your ear to the ground and find out what any group of bloggers are talking about? Some types of bloggers link out to each other a lot, making it easy to see what the hot topics are (see Techmeme, or Technorati). In some circles, though, blogs don't link to other blogs' posts regularly. That's why there will only be so many variations of Techmeme and why we need other tools if we want to track conversations in other parts of the blogging world.

That's what a new service called FeedVis offers. Give it a bundle of blogs (in OPML format) and it will give you a scrollable, searchable tag cloud - a visual representation of the most-used words in a given period of time among a defined group of blogs on any topic.

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Users can put FeedVis on their servers, upload a collection of blogs in OPML format and add a list of "stop words" to exclude from those terms from the popularity contest. The end result is a beautiful scrollable and searchable chart of the most popular words being used in one day, a seven day period or throughout the recent history of that collection of blogs. Increases and decreases in usage are displayed and clicking on any word will bring up the recent blog posts where it was found.

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There's a demo site available at FeedVis for up to 100 blogs, but there's not a way to upload a list of words to exclude so the analysis is of limited quality. In the example above, for example, you can see some very likely candidates for words that should be excluded from a group of education bloggers. You can see the interface on the demonstration site though and it looks quite handy.

The source code to put FeedVis on your own server is quite simple and easy to customize. We think a lot of people could find this service useful.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/track_hot_topics_on_niche_blogs.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/track_hot_topics_on_niche_blogs.php Products Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:51:29 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Finding Interesting Feeds Just Got Easier: Toluu Adds Tags toluu_logo.pngThe OPML sharing and matching service Toluu provides a great way to find and share interesting RSS feeds. One feature that had been missing so far, however, was tagging. In its latest update, which was released today, Toluu has made tagging one of the central features of the service, which will make finding new and interesting blogs through Toluu even easier.

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Now, every feed page on Toluu will show a "Tags" tab. This tab displays all the tags other users have already attached to the feed, as well as a text box to immediately start entering tags. Toluu also suggests tags based on a user's previous behavior on the site. The experience is reminiscent of tagging bookmarks in delicious, where the Ajax interface also makes adding suggested tags as easy as clicking on the keyword.

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Besides this, Toluu has gone out of its way to expose these new features in as many places as possible. When browsing through a list of feeds, for example, a little '+' sign appears next to every feed you mouse over, which then exposes an inline tagging interface.

Searching Tags

Because tags are now available on Toluu, the developers have also added the ability to search the complete index of all feeds in Toluu for a specific tag, which is a great way to discover new and interesting feeds to subscribe to.

Overall, we think Toluu did a great job in adding this new feature and making it easily accessible throughout the site. As the tagging feature is still pretty new, only a select few feeds actually have tags attached to them, but as more users start tagging feeds, this will surely become one of the most popular features on Toluu.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/toluu_adds_tagging.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/toluu_adds_tagging.php News Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:03:03 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Tag Clouds R.I.P.? I loved tag clouds from the moment I saw them, and I still do. Two years ago, they roamed the social web like buffalo on the pre-Columbian plains of North America... huge, thundering herds of keywords of all shades and sizes. And you'll see them to this day on many of their earliest adopters - from Delicious.com (makeover and all) to 43 Things.

These days, though, I'm noticing that on more and more sites the tag clouds have evaporated. I'm not saying they're dead (okay, granted, that's exactly what the cartoon's saying, but that's why they issue artistic licenses), but they're getting scarcer.

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]]> And maybe they were overused and abused back in the day; not every site lends itself to a tag cloud, and not every tag cloud needs to be overwhelming and cluttered. Still, they have their place, and I'd be sorry to see them die out.

Now, the Flash splash screen? I'd go to that funeral in my dancing shoes.

[Ed: readers are encouraged to ignore the RWW tag cloud, located in our sidebar, for this post.]

Top image credit: ocean.flynn

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tag_clouds_rip.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tag_clouds_rip.php Cartoons Sat, 02 Aug 2008 07:00:00 -0800 Rob Cottingham