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…