Day: June 29, 2005

I wonder if this or that matches what Dave Winer is talking about. I think it’s close… which is a coincidence. Happy or not, we’ll see.

P.S. It’s early. I don’t pretend the “a-ha” moment here is 100% clear. Work with me. Want to create one of your own? Let me know and you can be an early adopter, too.

So Coop is podcasting. I love that audio + feed = podcast. Not quite 1 + 1 = 2, but it’s not rocket science. Tools need to get better, though, because even that simplicity is not as easy to create as it should be.

Whether you call them tag clouds, heat maps, or just eclectic ransom notes, I think visual presentations of content via oddly-sized labels are fun to look at. They may even be usable. But let’s not worry about that just yet.

Take a look at an experiment: a tag cloud for News.com. Instead of user-applied tags, these labels are tags applied by the editors, so the popularity of different labels is by the number of stories which earned the label — known as topics — in the last 30 days. There are more ideas for this. For example, I prefer this view. But what do you think? There’s a feedback link… fire away. Or email me at work: john dot roberts at c n e t dot com.

Kudos to A and K for their work on this. Real names withheld only because I didn’t ask them if they minded.

Note: if Zeldman wrote in April that “Tag clouds are the new mullets,” then what does it mean to throw one into the ring in June? Oh well… maybe fashion will come around again… that’s what Web 2.0 is all about, right? What’s old is new again… 2005 is just 1998 with broadband, after all. And that makes all the difference.

By the way, you did try typing in that search field, didn’t you?

I’m not a follower of the Getting Things Done (GTD) threads that weave through so much of the blogosphere. I’m sure I could improve my habits and my life in many ways, but I like to believe that it’s will, not methods, that matter. That’s for me, individually.

For working as a team, though, process — especially shared process — is helpful. We’re trying Agile development practices for a big summer effort, and after some training and jumping right in, I’m optimistic. The best part about the Agile manifesto?

(A preference for) Responding to change over following a plan

When everyone acknowledges that change is a constant and that no one knows everything when starting a project, the pressure lifts… and more good work gets done, collaboratively. There is less waiting around for instruction, and more positive peer pressure to solve problems. It’s only week one. But nothing wrong with a good start.