the ryan king

I came across TagCloud a few days ago, but am just not getting around to blogging about it.

It purports to be an “automated Folksonomy tool.” More from them:

Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

TagCloud lets you create and manage clouds with content you are interested in, and let’s you publish them on your own website.

I don’t get where folksonomy comes in to play here. They have tags, yes, but a key characteristic of folksonomy is that it is collection of user created data. There’s no user creation here, all the tags they’re extracting are derived from the text itself by their algorithms.

Auto-tagging is not folkonomy. Jonas and I have been over this, remember? This post pretty much sums up my arguments against auto-tagging, though some the arguments presented there don’t apply to tagcloud, I’m not re-presenting the arguments, so just go read them there and figure out for yourself which ones apply.

The Ryan King

Not TherYanking

It sounds like The Lion King

I woke up this morning to a page full of London references. At first glance, they looked like spam, and I even marked them as such for a brief moment before I clicked on one of the links and saw that London had been the victim of a terrorist attack.

The blogosphere has been pretty interesting on this today and Technorati is tracking a large increase in blog posting and searching. There’s also a couple of flickr pools, Wikipedia has a page, as does Wikinews.

Wired has just published a piece on PlaceSite:

At the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, Savage announced his latest project, PlaceSite, which combines online social networking with real-life networking in Wi-Fi cafes by providing computer users with a website unique to a particular Wi-Fi cafe.

When Tantek and I encountered this display at the Where 2.0 conference last week we immediately jumped in to demo mode and showed off Plazes. Oddly, the PlaceSite guys had not heard of Plazes, though they would certainly be competitors (come on guys, just because it was a school project doesn’t mean you don’t have to do your homework).

Whereas PlaceSite is constrained to specific locations, you can use Plazes anywhere you have an internet connection. The PlaceSite guys claimed that the venue-centric approach will get you “a lot of users at once.”

No, it won’t.

It’ll get a lot of people who’re annoyed by this weird page popping up when they’re trying to get their email or checking their fantasy football scores. With Plazes, you get few people connected to your system, but they actually use it. Hopefully I don’t have to explain the difference.

Moral of this story? Join Plazes and add me as a contact. :-)