TagCloud php-news Cloud
I created a php-news cloud at TagCloud, a new service that launched this week. TagCloud accepts RSS feeds and uses the Yahoo! Content Analysis Web service to create an automated folksonomy for the posts in the feeds. In short, it guesses at the tags for each post (based on the post content) and organizes the posts according to those tags. Then, it creates a “cloud” of the tags to show frequency.
I’m sure the TagCloud creators are hoping to achieve the same level of success as Flickr and del.icio.us, but I can’t see the benefit of having a system automatically create a folksonomy for you, since the point of a folksonomy is the community-oriented “collaborative categorization” of items. Nevertheless, if TagCloud would open up their system as a REST-based service, I think we could start to realize the potential of such a service. In the meantime, it’s just something that’s fun to play with, and we’ll have to just wait and see how people choose to use it.
P.S. TagCloud is PHP-powered.
1 Comment
Thanks for the comments, Ben. I agree with you that automated folksonomies is oxymoronic from it's initial intention, but nevertheless we are seeing some interesting and dare I say, useful results from what we are doing. We've only been up for a couple days, but the response has been great, and we've had a lot of good feedback.
TagCloud is based on the experiment I did at http://yahoo.theherrens.com and at this point, we don't know what the importance of the project will be or even how people will use it. I think that's the best part about it though, because it's cool to see how things like TagCloud evolve when you open up the data and let people play.
We are prioritizing our features based on user requests -- we added OPML import today -- and you aren't the first person to request a REST interface. Actually, we designed the system so that you access your data in different formats according to the URI. I expect that 'XML' will be an option in the next few days, so you'll be able to do what you like with the data. Our next goal is better i18n support.