Watching the shifting tag clouds
There is little doubt that tag clouds have caught many people's attention as cool, new, and incredibly geeky. Sort of retro geek, like clunky eyeglass frames. Since I've added tagging to this blog I've been thinking about how to use tags to display patterns on the web in new ways. If you play with code that generates tag clouds, or just think about the problem for a minute, you will see that a cloud loses some value after a great number of posts are tagged. Eventually, the entire distribution includes hundreds to thousands of words and new forms of display are needed. One interesting idea would be to visualize a site's viewership stats as a tag cloud. You could analyse the last 7 days of stats, and build a tag distribution based on the relative frequency of viewing in the archive. The top ten tags could be extracted and listed in order on the site's navbar. You could see how readers are focusing their attention, which would inform future readers.
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