Pulling the Tag Cloud 1
I've pulled the my tag cloud off of the sidebar of the blog, as I'm not finding it to be a very good way to visualize data about what I'm writing about. As you can see:
the web2.0 tag is so big in this cloud that everything else gets swallowed up. I still think that tags are a good way to classify information, but the whole cloud growth idea seems to be flawed once one topic gets too much traction. Perhaps we could have a cloud where all of the words are the same size, but they have different intensities. Or maybe I just need to write less about web2.0. :)
Respect the Suspenders!
As I was walking home from work yesterday (and by home I mean the SF hotel that I've been residing in for the last couple of months) I heard a person loudly exclaim to the group of people he was with, "Guys who wear suspenders get respect!" After stopping to record this awesome quote in the Moleskine where I've started collecting my thoughts, I started thinking about what technologies I've been playing with lately could use some metaphorical suspenders.
Tagging, for one, could really use some suspenders. Despite the fact that everyone I know seems to be tagging things lately, I bet that >99% of the US still doesn't know what tagging is or why it's useful. Perhaps someone could come up with an elevator pitch for tagging that would convince my mom why it's cool. Stuff about "self-generated metadata" just isn't going to cut it. If there's already a good one of those, someone please let me know about it, because I need a good explanation for people.
Also, while we're on the subject of tagging, I would really like a service where I can feed all of my accounts into it and then get an RSS feed of all of the tagged data together. For example, I want to have an RSS feed for my halloween tag and get the blog entries, Flickr photos, del.icio.us links, etc that I've tagged with it. Anybody working on this sort of tag based aggregator, or do I have to write it myself?
