Looming clouds

Last summer (yes it was once summer) I wrote a bit about TagCloud — a nifty folksonomy visualization tool. When the MetaMuser mentioned this app recently, I took another look and decided to see how websites I visit might cloud together.

Which is a convoluted way of announcing ClayfoxClouds – wherein three groups of RSS feeds (library-related feeds, news feeds, and blogs-I-like feeds) converge into 75 tags each. Here’s a picture of tonight’s harvest:

The library-related and news-related tags (top, middle) do tend to group up a bit, while the blogs-I-like tags (on the bottom) tend to straggle individually — a reflection of the scattered nature of my recreational surfing, perhaps. In any case, automated harvesting is hardly a science; since TagCloud is not drawing from any standardized metadata, the occurrence of certain terms can seem arbitrary or trivial. Or unnecessary … pizza queen, anyone?

I’ll add more feeds into the mix as I run across them, who knows what tags will emerge — or, once clicked, where they will lead. If they lead nowhere, keep in mind that TagCloud is beta.

So go ahead, head into the clouds.