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What’s on my mind? Look at my del.icio.us tag-cloud

If you know the del.icio.us service then you know that you give each and every bookmark you file "tags" (key words). Well, there’s a little feature on it called tagrolls, which let’s you build pictures of tags or tag-clouds as they are known in the blog trade.

If you have a look at mine (below), its quite easy to see what’s on my mind these days (or at least what pages I’m squirelling away references to). The bigger the word, the more I haved tagged things to do with it.

Delicious

I really like the tag-cloud way of looking at the world, at information: by turning words into picutres of a kind.

Written words in a a linear way is limiting when it comes to expressing or organising ideas – hence the popularity of mind maps in recent years/ Mind maps that let you plot notes or thinking as spider-web like diagrams, peppered with pictures (a subject, by the way, which my father is something of an expert on: take a look at his blog here).

We’re seeing tag-clouds pop up in all sorts of places, and I expect to see them pop up in more from now on. I noticed one in the side-bar of Factiva‘s Search 2.0 beta the other day, to name but one.

Antony Mayfield

2 responses to “What’s on my mind? Look at my del.icio.us tag-cloud”

  1. zeevveez Avatar
    zeevveez

    Tag clouds look great. I copied my Tag Cloud from Blinklist to Photoshop and added a cloud filter and it looks even greater (http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/2006/02/my-tag-cloud.html) but the question is how useful are they and honestly – how much of your time is spent looking at them?

  2. Antony Avatar
    Antony

    The link seems to be broken, I’m afraid – but i can see the picture on the front page of your blog at http://qtsaver.blogspot.com/…

    I really like visual representations of text-based information. Mindmaps work for me, and still one of my favourite things on the web ever is the Thinkmap thesaurus (used to be called Plumb Design – have a look at (http://www.thinkmap.com/visualthesaurus.jsp).

    So I think that if people use tags increasingly (and it would make sense for them to do so – they are simple and they work better than filing in my experience) tagclouds will also become popular for analysing and navigating tagged data.

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