Tagging Yourself and Others
Like a lot of web people these days, I’ve been actively tagging my “stuff” in del.icio.us, Flickr, rojo, BlinkList, and Technorati. The more I tag both the content that I produce (blog posts, photos, links) and the content that I find (bookmarks, news stories, blog posts), the more I’m looking for a web application or an installable program that will allow me to view and navigate this kind of two-way view of tags: my tagging and my tagging of “others.”
For the internal view of tags within my own blog, I recently started using an interesting web application, TagCloud. After a simple sign-up, you can create a new clouds by naming them, providing a description, and then adding your RSS feed. It took a day or so for TagCloud to crawl my RSS, but once it did it produced tags derived from the text content of my blog as links. Some of the tags I expected (web application, books) but others like “popping” or “online play” were pleasantly unexpected (see screenshot). You can see a working sample at my TagCloud page showing tags generated from my RSS/blog posts.
For the external view of what tags I’ve used for the content that I find, I just tried delicious tag clouds, an application that “lets you cluster your del.icio.us bookmarks into tag clouds.” You simply enter your delicious username and password and voila, your tag clouds are clustered once you login (see screenshot).
You can select up to 75 clusters to group various tag relationships and then browse to those tag sorts in your own delicious account. Or, you can toggle the “Show Bookmarks” feature and browse your bookmarks directly (see screenshot).
Another delicious tag cloud generator is Revealicious, created by Sebastien Pierre, with help from Olivier Zitvogel and Yann Klis. Revealicious is quite impressive as a means of providing multiple graphic visualizations of your data and its relationships. There are three main ways to explore your tags: spacenav, tagcloud and grouper, and each provides a beautiful and dynamic spatial view of your tags. Spacenav is extremely fluid and the execution is as beautiful as many art algorithms that I’ve seen (see screenshot).
Having experimented with these I would love to see a mash-up of these two types of tagging – both internal and external tags in one overview map or cloud.
I also wrote about this in a previous post, Tag This.
2 comments
- Michiel on October 17, 2005 at 12:54 AM:
For tagging, the fun happens at the intersections (yours/others, tag1/tag2)…I’ve tried both the clustering and the flash a while ago, but found that the clusters don’t make much sense (for me), and the flash gets overloaded (since I’m well on my way to 1200 del.icio.us tags) so that didn’t work out too well. Of course these apps are just getting started.
In this post (jesus, that was end of january! how time flies when your tagging fun!) I examine a few Java apps that explore tag relationships.
- Emily on December 29, 2005 at 09:09 PM:
I’ve never had great success with Java apps but this looks interesting, thanks.