YAUBF => Yet Another Unneccessary Buzzword (or Bullshit) Feature

When it’s well crafted, I think a tag cloud can give you a nice idea about a blog’s hot topics.

I probably wouldn’t need a tag cloud for TechCrunch - I already know what the site is about, but when I land on a new blog, a tag cloud, rather than confusing me (as some people who dislike tag clouds would say) actually saves me time: in one shot I get a pretty clear picture of the things being discussed there.

Neccessary? Hardly, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be useful for some people.

People should use tags in a proper way

It made sense on something like flickr (where it made it easier to identify photos).
If Riya works as they say it would, the tagging of photos would be redundant, too.

But tagging posts as ether? digg?, etc

Similar to the previous example, you could tag an article as humor or rumor, coz this attribute might not be discernible by a search engine (yet).

Hey, it is what it is. Some bloggers may like it. I find the eurekster tagcloud to the right useful.

Met, there’s a difference between tags “as we know it” and what you’d see in a cloud built by ZoomClouds or TagCloud. The latest are (in theory at least) the result of extracting relevant terms or keywords from the latest posts.

When I see ‘ether’ or ‘digg’, I can tell Mike has been talking about those services lately more than, say, about Flickr or garbanzo beans. That really is it, and some people may find it quite useful and others will think of it as YAUBF

Are these really *tag* clouds? Well, they look like them A more proper definition could be a “what have I been talking about lately” cloud.

Granted, it’s just a feature, a plugin, an add-on. Nothing sophisticated. Nothing where one could build a multimillion dollars business model around. Not the next big thing, and so on, but if it actually tells something about a blog and perhaps even assist new visitors in getting an idea about what’s going on in there lately, then well, that’s it. How else could you do that automatically inside a 200×200 pixel box?

Techcrunch: your best source of Gabe-related news.

Remember what headlines and deks and pullquotes and captions were/are for? Context, urgency, telegraphing ideas. See a headline, you know just how important the story is. When someone finally gets around to inventing a presentation layer XML that faithfully recreates what headlines do in different fonts, tag clouds will be seen as the screen wasters they really are.

Trying to automate the process of tagging will not work. it defeats the purpose of tagging. delicious works because ppl tag it.

Google thinks otherwise, that machines should tag and not ppl.

I may have to give ZoomClouds a try since the TagCloud I created over a month ago is still not working properly.

I added mine tonight. TagCloud never did work for me.

Same, here. TagCloud didn’t work for me either.

I like the time frame feature that I mentioned in my blog a while back.

I installed it on CoMagz Linkadelic Magazine, hoping that it be a good way to expose what’s inside to the front page.

What I found is that it does a really bad word in selecting the words.

The words list I got is
“anniversary · boingboing · blurb · blogs · buttons · copyrighted · domain names · domain · einstein · engadget · email · google · gmail · gift ideas · identity management solutions · leds · media · microsoft · microprocessor · new feature · names · online · personal information · passwords · rights · real estate · scott · service · video sharing · where ”

Which Absoluteley doesn’t represent the content.

I checked for example the word “Scott”.
The sentence in which it appears is
” Scott Granneman, from Security focus, has an interesting article about DRM.According to Scott DRM is bad for everybody except Hollywood firms.”
The title of the article is “DRM pitfalls - Why DRM is a big mistake”

And guess what? The word DRM doesn’t appear!

Anyway, perhaps DRM is not a dictionary word (is it ?) and is too short. I’ll keep it a while to see if it’s worth the space it requires.

You can have a look at http://www.comagz.com/webmagazine/

i hate tag clouds. please can some design something better.

and drop me a mail

I was just doing some Google searches to see if anyone else has been having a problem with ZoomClouds. Mine hasn’t updated (torley.com) even tho I’ve made plenty of blog entries, and I’ve noticed others haven’t either, like the one on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. I’ve fiddled around with settings to no avail–sadly it looks like my ZoomCloud is stuck in stasis.

I’ve contacted the Zoom folks but haven’t heard back yet. I wonder what’s going on.