Tag Cloud 2.0

One of the less con­tro­ver­sial ‘good things’ about Web 2.0 is the tag cloud. There’s one on the top-​​right of this page. In years gone by, that would have been a list of the cat­egories covered on this site. So why is the cloud better than a list? Two things occur to me:

(a) The com­pact­ness means it has an imme­diate visual impact. You can get a good sense in one glance of what this blog is about and whether or not you might want to follow it. While that cloud happens to be in alpha­bet­ical order, arguably size order would do an even better job.

(b) It’s a tool as well as a picture. Each of those words leads to a series of articles. Maybe you came here looking for articles about business. You can see I some­times write on that subject at a glance and with a single click you can bring up all of them. (That is the reason I choose alpha­bet­ical order, by the way: so readers can look up topics more easily).

They’ve become ‘part of the fur­niture’ of Web 2.0 sites, perhaps, appre­ci­ated but not really con­sidered. So I was inter­ested to see the topic re-​​emerge this week on the O’Reilly Radar blog. Andrew Odewahn, director of the O’Reilly network had applied a tag cloud filter to Tim O’Reilly’s ‘What is Web 2.0′ essay. He ended up with this:

And you can see one defin­i­tion in a moment’s glance — a pretty reas­on­able one at that — of Web 2.0. It’s web software applic­a­tions and services that deal with the links between data and users. You don’t even have to read the essay to get a good idea of the O’Reilly’s point of view of what is important in this sphere.

On the other hand, though, there are some big holes in this picture. It doesn’t mention anything about ‘col­lective intel­li­gence’ or the ‘wisdom of crowds’, both of which are pretty central to the web 2.0 idea and the essay. Why? Because they are phrases and com­puters aren’t very good at dealing with language beyond single words. To a computer ‘col­lective intel­li­gence’ is just two words; the ‘wisdom of crowds’ is three. It’s picked up the word ‘col­lective’ but it’s in small type. The algorithms used to generate clouds might be tweaked or primed by an intel­li­gent operator to provide a ‘seed list’ of terms, but making the creation of clouds auto­matic — so it can recog­nise key phrases without help — remains a bit of a holy grail.

So going forward, a few inter­esting altern­at­ives have emerged through the comments. Mark Woodman is working on a ‘tag con­stel­la­tion’ that analyses the top one hundred blogs to come up with a cloud rep­res­enting the current ‘buzz’ across the blogs. This was about a story con­cerning Fujitsu making a very big hard drive. It’s also very inter­active so clicking on the orbiting words would lead to other, con­nected stories.

Moritz Stefaner is working on another altern­ative. The colour intensity com­ple­ments the words to show the extent of the buzz around par­tic­ular topics. The cloud retains intel­li­gence about what words relate to which topics, but fades them in and out according to whether or not they are hot right now:

Ted Shelton at Personal Bee is working on phrase analysis. Their site is a news aggreg­ator and so identi­fying hot news stories depends on the recog­ni­tion of phrases. ‘Big’ shouldn’t be recog­nised, but add ‘Brother’ and it’s probably part of a story. Add ‘racism row’ and you def­in­itely know it is. Here’s a part of their view of the buzz around the topic of Web 2.0 today:

Of these three altern­at­ives, it’s impossible to say that one is on the right track or that others are wrong. That will depend on the specific applic­a­tion they’re being used for, and the tastes of users. Different demo­graphics will probably like one model more than another. Two things though, I think are abso­lutely vital for the next gen­er­a­tion of any of these news tracker applications:

• Phrase recog­ni­tion — This can probably happen auto­mat­ic­ally through language analysis for estab­lished stories, but may need to be done by hand for now for breaking news.
• More dimen­sions — we already have size, but currency and authority could really improve the ability to navigate such clouds.

Don’t know if you have seen the Quintura search applic­a­tion? It creates a mind map around search terms, letting users delve in and refine their topics on the fly. Sadly, it can’t do phrases and its language analysis doesn’t always work well. However, a new, improved Quintura for today’s blog posts from the people I read and the people that they’ve linked to is what I really want.

Technorati: folk­sonomy, tags, Web 2.0, website

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