Nontrivial Exercises

“Tagclouding” Your Blog (Or Any RSS Feed)

For the last couple of months, as I’ve really started using del.icio.us (now that it’s so easy to do with Flock), Technorati, and as I’ve been thinking about tags on Flickr, I have wondered why I can’t have a tagcloud for my blog. Typepad, and many other blogging services, offer categories, which is a start at organizing your data. However, tag clouds contain much more information in a much cleaner view.

I decided that I want one for this blog, and set out on a search. Here is what I have found, and it’s pretty cool:

<!–
.zoomclouds  {
   text-align: left;
   border:1px solid #006699;
   padding:2px;
   position:relative;
   background-color:#FFFFFF;
   width:300px;
}
.zoomclouds span a, .zoomclouds a {
   margin: 0 2px;
   text-decoration:none;
   font-family: Helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
}
.zoomclouds span.tag1 a {color:#6588c7}
.zoomclouds span.tag2 a {color:#254887}
.zoomclouds span.tag3 a {color:#355897}
.zoomclouds span.tag4 a {color:#4568a7}
.zoomclouds span a:hover, .zoomclouds a:hover {
   color:#FFFFFF;
   background-color:#8ca5b5;
   text-decoration:none;
}
.zoomcloudswg {
   font-size:10px;
   color: #bbb;
}
.zoomcloudssp {
   font-size:10px;
   color: #444;
}
–>

The cloud is from Zoomclouds, but let me talk about some other alternatives and why I like this service the best.

The obvious place to start for tagcloud goodness is Technorati, since they are built around categorizing information with tags in the first place. Technorati will show your top tags on your profile page there, but I don’t believe there is any way to customize and re-use that tagcloud. Here’s my current one from my Technorati profile page:

So this is neat, but not exactly useful to place on my blog. My search continued until I found the service, appropriately named, TagCloud. They sounded promising, and they have an interesting twist, as they use Yahoo’s content analysis service via their API to pull out and optimize the most relevant tags.

However, for whatever reason, it doesn’t work for me and this blog. The tagcloud I created is just blank:

So, no tagcloud goodness to be had there. I was wondering if anyone had really implemented this yet, when I found Zoomclouds. They seemed to offer essentially what I was looking for, and so I gave them a try. It actually works quite nicely and has very detailed customization options. You enter an RSS feed and it creates a cloud based on content and presumably tags and categories that may already be in the feed. They don’t mention their analysis methodology, but it appears very accurate and useful based on my experiment for this blog.

Now, some really cool things you can do with Zoomclouds that really make it a useful service:

• They offer an open API which is very straightforward and lightweight, allowing you to get and use some results from your cloud
• As mentioned above, they offer some pretty nice design customizations for each cloud you create. You can make your design public and use others’ published designs for your cloud. Here’s an example of the design interface:

• You can use filters to either remove a tag that isn’t relevant or is annoying – e.g. my cloud had the word “blog” as a top tag, but that really didn’t provide much useful info, so I filtered it out. You can also specify specific tags to include, in case they don’t appear by default.
• Finally, and what may be the coolest part of Zoomclouds, is the stats. If you place your cloud on your website, Zoomclouds will track the clickthrough stats for each tag! Here is an example stats page of my newly created cloud (thus, no stats yet):

I’m really excited about Zoomclouds and plan to add this cloud to my blog soon. Anyone have any other experience with tagclouds? Lemme know…

Technorati Tags: tagcloud, technorati, zoomclouds, tagging, rss