Day: July 5, 2005

A long, sunny holiday weekend was well misspent. No broadband connectivity, so no temptation to keep up with the online world. Because my current non-fiction read is lengthy, I took a one-day breather with The Da Vinci Code. Yes, I’m a bit late to this mega-best-selling party. The pages turned, and I got what I wanted. Felt like Umberto Eco dumbed down, which is both a wonderful thing and a (mild) disappointment. Historical mysteries are grand, especially with the scavenger hunt aspect thrown in. But where Eco built up the possibilities, and wove a tale that bound me and then cast me aside as it continued to ever-more-ethereal diversions, Dan Brown didn’t lose his story. Everything gets tidied up, perhaps a bit too smoothly. But for a summer beach read, spot on. Eco taunted me with Foucault’s Pendulum because the first third or so was one of the best stories I’ve ever read. Yet, somewhere in the middle, the story dropped from view so Eco could deliver magisterial asides. These snippets are interesting, as long as they are snippets. But they took over the tale in that novel. Anyway, next time I have a few hours to kill, I won’t mind picking up Dan Brown once again, even if he doesn’t live up to the standard set here.

I threw out a link on Wednesday evening, but the RSS promo from work late Thursday afternoon actually drew attention to the News.com tag cloud. Only found two links via Technorati. Several more came up via Feedster. Bloglines citations, too, did pretty well. Here’s the filtered, mixed list of those I could read in English:

• Jim Muttram wants a different sort… one of the available choices gives him what he wants, so UI must work harder to make that more obvious.
• George Scriban wonders if the topics are ad-hoc or pre-defined. The latter.
• Marc Canter throws the credit the wrong way.
• Chen Luyi includes the page in his Saturday links.
• Mercury News notes the page in their Friday round-up.
• Barry Reicherter thinks the page was copied from 43Things. Nope. Not original, of course, but not that single site. I mentioned the mullet.
• Jeff Lundberg wonders, as do we, whether this is useful, or just visually interesting.
• Steve Rubel is paying attention, but thinks the tagging is new. Not quite. Editors have been tagging for years, and the topics have been visible on stories for most of that period. This is just a new visualization of existing information. With luck, the dynamic picture unlocks something of value. Otherwise, it’s just fun to look at… which isn’t a bad thing.
• Garrett French wonders why he would use a tag cloud to navigate CNET News.com rather than existing alternatives. There’s no reason you have to. The page is an experiment. There are also some default options that need to be changed, clearly, because few seem to play with the alternatives much. I vastly prefer the alphabetical view myself.
• Mark Tosczak noted the page’s debut.

Hmmmm…