TagCloud
Posted: June 27th, 2005 | Author: Mark Phillipson | Filed under: Metawriting, Tagging | 2 Comments »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.
[...] The folksonomy juggernaut is rolling towards museums, as an intriguing article in this month’s D-Lib Magazine (“Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement”) makes clear. [...]
[...] Last summer (yes it was once summer) I wrote a bit about TagCloud — a nifty folksonomy visualization tool. When the MetaMuser mentioned the app recently, I took another look and decided to see how content that I often look at might cloud together. [...]