Blogger Jimmy Palmer has one hell of a time keeping his readers current with fresh, relevant content.
Adding links by hand is both time-consuming and ineffective for those who can't spend 24 hours a day watching for breaking news. Relying on RSS feeds means fresh headlines, but the clutter of irrelevant content.
Now, many bloggers are turning to a new service called TagCloud that lets them cherry-pick articles in RSS feeds by key words -- or tags -- that appear in those feeds. The blogger selects the RSS feeds he or she wants to use, and also selects tags. When a reader clicks on a tag, a list of links to articles from the feeds containing the chosen keyword appears. The larger the tag appears onscreen, the more articles are listed.
"I have no time to monitor the 20 or 30 sites that I should monitor to pull all the DRM information I use on (my) site," said Jimmy Palmer, whose DRMBlog is devoted to digital rights management. "With TagCloud, all my readers can go to that one page to see which words are appearing most often."
The upshot, said Palmer, is he's now able to give his readers one-click access to a wide range of timely articles without being tied to his computer.
TagCloud creator John Herren said the project, which launched in free beta earlier this month and has around 1,500 users, stems from a previous effort which aggregated keywords from Yahoo News articles.
But Herren wanted to give users the ability to define their own article sources instead of relying on Yahoo. That means, he said, giving site owners the chance to aggregate from the nearly unlimited supply of RSS feeds.
"The exciting part of TagCloud is that we don't know what people are going to use it for," Herren said. "We don't want to limit it. We want to make it as open as possible, just to see what people are going to do with it."
TagCloud is the next step in the evolution of folksonomies. These are collections of tags related to photographs, websites, articles and the like, and are prominent elements of sites like the photo-sharing service Flickr and the social bookmarking site De.licio.us. But TagCloud differs from its predecessors with its automated aggregation of data from RSS feeds, rather than from a single service.
"I'm a big fan of the whole folksonomy thing," said James Kendall, who writes the Online Music Blog. "But I do think this is innovative in that I don't know of any other services where you can go and with a couple clicks build this and put it on your site."
Meanwhile, because TagCloud is still in beta, Herren and his colleagues at IonZoft, which developed the service, are working on ironing out bugs and adding features. He said one that had been urgently requested by site owners was the ability to define words that could be kept out of a cloud, such as foreign terms. He calls this feature "stopwords."
He's also hoping to develop a way to animate tag clouds in the near future. The idea would be to build in a visual aging element, so tags would grow or shrink with time and give readers a way to see instantly how recent tags are.
"Larger tags could float to the top," Herren said, "and smaller tags could float to the bottom with time."
