TagCloud
Monday, June 27, 2005
Folksonomy meets RSS: TagCloud.
Yes I know: ‘folksonomy’ is a particularly hideous neologism - it basically means metadata assigned by a non-hierarchical community. D-Lib let the word rattle and clunk around a rundown of ’social bookmarking tools’ in April. Ever since it’s been nagging me - it’s just too unholy of a mix of populism and taxonomy.
TagCloud describes itself as an “automated folksonomy tool” - which I think is a particularly trendy/tortured way of saying: it scans RSS feeds for frequency of terms, then display the most prominent terms in text that is scaled to represent frequency. You know, like Flickr’s tags.
It’s a work in progress, and Danny Sullivan has written about some of its limitations in SearchEngineWatch. But TagCloud seems like a good way to get a torrent of RSS-fed information into some kind of visual handle on the user end. You know, where folks live.
Wikinews
Monday, June 27, 2005
Tail-chasing in news: after running across a story in the Boston Globe about the inevitable newWikinews (actually, after enduring a splash ad & then running into the story), I wondered how a venture like this (so amateur, so unauthoritative, so doe-eyed Internet) would actually work.
So I picked a story that might well attract obliteration of just-the-facts-ma’m: Wikinews coverage of the Supreme Court uanimous slapdown of file sharing - with the intention of comparing it to ‘real’ news coverage.
Surprisingly, the New York Times had nothing about this story on its home page - the NYT was consumed, instead, with the covering the Court’s refusal to consider saving Judith Miller from going to jail for protecting her sources.
So I next turned to CNET’s coverage of the file-swapping ruling . It was a more extensive than the Wikinews treatment - but, as of right now, the tone seems similar; both writeups of the story are balanced and neutral in tone. Of course, the Wikinews entry could and will change.
Fluidity make a return visit to the same story on Wikinews interesting - this kind of news is its own development. And, at least in this case, it swamps the ’story’, newssharing over filesharing.