Friday, March 07, 2008

Tag clouds

Hi all,

Thanks for the post Andy, looks really interesting. I read most of that book a couple of years back for my course and found it quite thought-provoking. Sadly at the time I was on the most intensely techy course I've ever been on and what I needed was a way of learning html, JavaScript, PHP and MySql in a month so I had to give up on Morville and Rosenfeld...

Anyway, what I logged in to post was the details of the tag cloud site I mentioned -http://tagcrowd.com/ It's a very cool site that will let you create a 'cloud' of tags like this http://del.icio.us/tag/ - only for whatever document you like! I've just done it for the results of the CLIST survey and it picks out the key points really quite nicely, but I can't paste it in here.

The main things to think about are the 'stopwords' (removing the 'noise' - eg does the fact that the word 'user' was mentioned 4 times add anything to the data compared to say 'workload') and the context - there's a big difference between 'user-friendly' and 'it would help if it was more user-friendly' and that may need picking out manually. Looks really very cool in a report etc though and a handy little analytical tool to save you doing all the counting yourself.

Anyway, I've just realised how sad it is that I'm posting this at 9.45 on a Friday night (it gets worse, I've just applied for an ISA online - how rock'n'roll are my Friday nights?!) so I'm going to go now, but hope you're all having a nice weekend.
Louisa