Ben Ramsey

I created a php-news cloud at TagCloud, a new service that launched this week. TagCloud accepts RSS feeds and uses the Yahoo! Content Analysis Web service to create an automated folksonomy for the posts in the feeds. In short, it guesses at the tags for each post (based on the post content) and organizes the posts according to those tags. Then, it creates a “cloud” of the tags to show frequency.

I’m sure the TagCloud creators are hoping to achieve the same level of success as Flickr and del.icio.us, but I can’t see the benefit of having a system automatically create a folksonomy for you, since the point of a folksonomy is the community-oriented “collaborative categorization” of items. Nevertheless, if TagCloud would open up their system as a REST-based service, I think we could start to realize the potential of such a service. In the meantime, it’s just something that’s fun to play with, and we’ll have to just wait and see how people choose to use it.

P.S. TagCloud is PHP-powered.