Blog: Tagging

Getting Tag Storm Compatible, Lined Up, and Working with Drupal

While I was redesigning our website, I decided to redo our blog’s tag cloud. I wrote an override to the default tagadelic theme function that added randomized positioning to each tag using inline CSS. Once overlayed on a nice background image our new tag cloud, aka tag storm, came into being.

The only problem left was getting it to work in Internet Explorer. I had suspected that I may have to downgrade the skin to get it working in IE, but for once the opposite happened – IE made it better.

If you look at the image above or at the tag cloud on our blog you’ll see that the tags are spread evenly throughout the space and most of the tags are only slightly obscured by other tags. But at first tag storm behaved pretty erratically, sometimes stacking all of the tags on top of each other in a usability mess, like this.

Tools That Show What's Happening in a Glance

One of the features that sets the Managing News system apart from other aggregators is that it makes it easy to act on information. It does this by showing you the big picture of what’s going on within the system over different timeframes.

The latest graph we plan to integrate into Managing News is a line graph that will show the terms (with the highest and lowest rate of change) that have risen or fallen fastest over a period of time. This will quickly show you the newest hot topics and what is already old news. A big benefit of this graph is that it will cut out issues that are always talked about in your field.

Adding realtime metadata to videos

Below is a two minute video clip from Bill O'Reilly's May 11th episode of The Talking Points Memo. No, our beliefs haven't done an about face. I was experimenting with Viddler.com and decided to use it to fact check O'Reilly's show. I went in and, right on the video clip itself (thanks Viddler), tagged it and added comments to expose O'Reilly's bogus commentary. But why take my word? The video gets smarter as more metadata is added, so why don't you fact check my facts and post them as comments and add a few tags while you're in there? Just scroll over the dots in the segment to read my comments.

I just bought a book on Amazon.com and saw the site’s latest feature  - tags! When you view some items such as books or cds (tags haven’t been  incorporated throughout the entire site yet), there’s an area where you can add a tag. And if you scroll down past the familiar categorizations such as "Customers who viewed this book also viewed" you’ll see what other people tagged the item and who they are.