Prettier Tag Coulds with Wordle

(Via Max Kiesler)

Wordle is a java applet, created by Jonathan Feinberg, which creates aesthetically pleasing tag clouds from text you enter, offering you rough control over layout, font, and colors.

Here’s one I created based on the current content of this blog (click on it to view full size):

Note that Enterprise comes out heavy – I assume that has to do with the Enterprise 2.0 conference being the title of many recent posts.

Newsflashr

At last month’s North Shore Web Geek Meetup, I met Gal Arav, the creator of Newsflashr (and formerly creator of InstantBull):

Newsflashr aggregates feeds from a large number of news sources, and lets you scan the headlines from those feeds as a tag cloud (what are the interesting terms which appear frequently in the headlines in those feeds) as well as in a list sorted by Alexa rank.

It’s the kind of site you can spend a lot of time in, if you’re a news junkie, playing around with different sorting options and looking for trends in the data.

Here’s the tag cloud, for example of the “elections 08″ topic as I am writing this post:

You can also switch into feed view, in which case you’re arranging feeds on a grid, as you might in something like pageflakes or netvibes.

Worth a look if you’re a news junkie or just obsessed with the upcoming election.

Twitter Clouds

Check out Tweet Clouds – new app which uses the Twitter API to create a tag cloud based on your tweets, optionally suppressing @s and removing stop words.

Here’s mine (click to see full size):

I wonder how much this changes over time, or how far back they are able to grab tweets.

WordPress 2.3 Tags not indexed on Technorati?

Update:

Changed the permalink structure (options->permalink) to custom so that permalinks are of the form:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%

Rather than using the “date and name” option which looks much the same but has the trailing slash.

This also strips the trailing slash from the tags link. I’ll try this for a while and see how it works – WordPress accepts the requests and drops the slash if requested. Hopefully technorati will re-index the posts and pick up the tags.

/Update

For the last few days I’ve been attending the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago, and blogging a fair amount about what I saw there. While doing so, I religiously tagged my posts with fcf07, as recommended by Jeremiah.

Yet my posts were not getting indexed, or aggregated, or even found as part of the technorati tag fcf07.

Why not?

I think there is a conflict between WordPress 2.3′s tagging feature and Technorati‘s expectations for tags.

On Technorati’s Tagging with Links page, they explain:

1. The tag link must occur within the boundaries of a weblog post to be included in Technorati’s index.
2. The constructed link must define a link relationship of “tag” by adding rel=”tag” to each post link you would like Technorati to include in its tag index.
3. The referenced URL must have content after the final forward-slash (“/”).

It’s that third one I’m wondering about. On my blog, the tags WordPress generates have links which end with a trailing slash. For example, the tag for fcf07 appears in those posts like this:

<a href="http://www.openparenthesis.org/tag/fcf07/" rel="tag">fcf07</a>

Note that trailing slash after fcf07. I think this trailing slash prevents Technorati, which does index my posts, from seeing these as valid tags.

Anyone else seeing similar behavior with WordPress 2.3 and posts getting indexed by technorati but the tags being ignored?