I like it when people work on projects for fun and produce beautiful things.
Corey, who is one of my co-conspirators in librariesinteract.info, yesterday launched thali tags.
Thali tags is a tag cloud built from the most novel terms from posts in the personal blogs of the mob (the thali ) who look after lint. Blogs indexed are:
Corey explains the process in more detail in his blog. It involves scrunching the feeds up, forcing them through a Yahoo Pipe for some content analysis and then spitting them out into a tag cloud.
You can click on each tag and see the blog posts that they are from. I read all these blogs and I would have said that there was very little overlap. Now I see that over time, we often blog about the same thing, but from very different angles.
It came from one of those idle gmail chats we were having about some less exciting aspect of administering lint months ago. “Hey Corey, Dave Pattern has done this with a whole bunch of international blogs, wouldn’t it be cool if we had something like this for lint “. And then off he went, did some tinkering and produced the thali tags. Wish I could do stuff like that, but I guess I’m happy to be cheerleader.
I’ve really enjoyed watching the thali work together with this. Corey would tweak the tags a bit more, show it to the rest of us and then we’d give him feedback, or encouragement. It’s given the rest of us a better understanding of how the tags work and provided Corey with a sounding board as he went.
By the way, things might get a little quieter here in the next month or so. I have a few family camping weekends plus Mr4’s “whole-class-and-a-visit-from-Fireman-Kev-and-his-firetruck” fifth birthday party coming up. And MPOW launches a 23 Things program in 2 weeks, and it looks like our uni will have more Second Life activity soon, and then there are those VALA papers that need to be written if I want to pop across Australia and hang out with some very interesting folk in February. Last time I said I would be blogging less, I think ended up blogging more – maybe it acts as stress relief.