Tag Clouds are often bypassed by users and really only function as a brief glimpse into the content of a blog. After posting about stylised tag clouds recently, I searched for a service on the web that might aid their creation.

...I stumbled upon Wordle - An automated tag cloud creator

It's an interesting service that creates tag clouds from a block of text or your Digg links. I ran the service for all the words in this entire blog and tinkered with the settings to create three new tag clouds [click on any of them to bring up an enlarged version.]

First up, the one you'd most expect - this cloud contains the top 80 words on the blog:




Next up, I tried it with the top 1000 words, giving a slightly ridiculous - but still quite fun - tag cloud:




And lastly, I gave it a go with only the top 9 words:




So there we have it. They're not too bad either, with the general themes appearing most often. I altered the style settings on each one to make them more aesthetically pleasing - why not give it a go yourself?

In order to highlight hyperlinks within blog posts and to distinguish them from other links on the blog (tags, topics, blog title etc), I've made inline links blink with an animated dotted line below them.

There are two parts to this method. You need to set up the CSS for the blinking links and distinguish these links from all other links on the page (especially important when using general a:link type CSS).

So, firstly you may well have set up a CSS class that covers the text where the links will be (in this case, all hyperlinks within a blog post message). In this example, we're calling the class 'blinks':

 .blinks {font-family: Tahoma; color: #DDDDDD; 
          font-size: 12px;}

A complication will come if you are using general hyperlink style code within your CSS, such as this:

 a:link {text-decoration:none; color:#B99D73}
 a:visited {text-decoration:none; color:#abb7ba}
 a:hover {text-decoration:underline; font-weight:bold;}
 a:active {text-decoration:underline; font-weight:bold;}

In order to override the general hyperlink styles, you have to set up hyperlink styles specific to your class. This is also where you add the code to make the links blink. To do this, I'm using a tiny animated GIF and setting its location underneath the link text:

 .blinks a:link {
     font-family: Tahoma; 
     color: #DDDDDD; 
     background: url(Images/line.gif) repeat-x bottom left;
  }

Feel free to use this image / code on your own website - it's good to share!

Download the flashing line image

All you need to make sure now is that the links you want to blink are within the class you have defined it in. This class may cover all the text of the message, or just the link itself, as in the following example:

 <span class="blinks">
 <a href="../blog/Images/line.gif">link text</a>
 </span>

Enjoy!

I'm interested as to how many people use Tag Clouds for anything useful? Are they an idle graphic or a beneficial tool? I imagine most of us will have come across Tag Clouds and similar web 2.0 gadgets before...

...I normally look at a tag cloud to grasp a general of idea of the data / users I'm looking at / blogging with. Therefore, why not play with the idea a little bit and create a nice tag cloud graphic, showing the most popular topics within a blog.

This will instantly give the user an idea of what the blog is about and also which topics dominate proceedings...



This is the tag cloud for the Beats! Design Blog as of June 2008. Font size is scaled with the number of tags for each word (from blog posts) and all the tags are jumbled together in a slanty cloud.

I've added it to the new blogbar at the right of the blog, just so people can see roughly what the blogs about. As this is a bit small, clicking on the cloud will take you to this post...simple :)

Inspired by a competition and equally by new techniques I'd learned in photoshop - I decided to try and turn a webpage into a paper aeroplane...

You see, I'm a regular reader of the BBC Magazine Monitor Blog and recently they suggested a competition to show how a webpage could be folded.



I was quite pleased with the results (well, for 20 mins work) but the main reason I tried it out was the ability of photoshop to move images in a 3D space...(try pressing CTRL in a free transform).

It's an interesting tool - and one I'll use more and more - that can really help with designing various image products. This function has been in photoshop for a while but I've only just got to grips with it, yet it seems pretty effective..



I'll keep you updated as to the results of the competition - fingers crossed my ideas are appreciated, but there's a lot of talented peeps out there so I'm not expecting anything! :)

UPDATE [10/06/08]: Success! My design was the first feature in the competition results - great stuff!

BBC Monitor Blog: Make your own foldie.

I'm not sure why this seemed humourous to me, but there you go - when newspaper headline boards slip up...



[Seen outside my flat]

I've just got myself a new SmartPhone and have downloaded the Google Maps program (CAB file) for Windows Mobile. It's a great little program and an easy to use - and useful - addition to my phone.

When you load it up, it will centre the map on your current location based on triangulation or GPS (only with GPS-activated phones, of course). The things work pretty much as normal, allowing maps to be explored. But crucially, this allows you to find out where you are when you don't know where you are! (mobile-internet signal depending..)

Triangulation uses distances to various mobile antenna and is available on all phones, but can only provide a location within an accuracy of 1km or so (of course, this varies upon location).



What I'm interested in is the relative qualities of the triangulation and GPS systems and what this service would be used for. I've recently ordered a Bluetooth GPS device so I'll let you know how useful it becomes, but is triangulation accuracy enough?

When traveling in a foreign location, a map of where you are could be immensely useful, but with street names listed on the maps, even 1km accuracy will help you find your way. The only case you'd need higher accuracy is when in more remote location (such as finding a path on a walking route) but of course, the quality of maps and GPS signal in such locations can be dramatically less.



For now, triangulation is OK, but I'm about to explore the use of GPS and (hopefully) OS maps as a walking tool. I'll report back on progress! I imagine GPS will be added to all phones within 5 years, but I suppose this will only happen if it offers any real advantage - perhaps we're waiting on online mapping technology to provide the relevant accuracy to correspond with a GPS?

Watch this space!

Photosynth is a Microsoft acquisition which first surfaced in 2006. It brings in photos from a variety of sources on a specific subject and aligns them in a 3D space, bringing together these various shots into an explorable whole.

Rather than giving an extended description, it's best to watch the video from the 2006 TED conference, seen below:



Although it's seen little further development (in the public arena, anyway) since its introduction, it still blows me away in 2008. As this is a Microsoft Labs project, there is a large amount of information on the official website detailing the service, so I'll let you explore at will (you need a small download to view it).



I really hope this technology has further use - it did feature in a Nasa project in 2007 - as it still has no contemporaries in the web world.

Photosynth - Microfsoft Labs
Photosynth on Wikipedia