September 29th, 2009, 2 Comments »
This Saturday is Vancouver’s fourth annual BarCamp. A bit like Northern Voice, the event has doubled in scope over that time. The first one, back in 2006, had 120 people (as many as would fit in Workspace). This one apparently has 299 people coming.
Boris the BarCamp Organizer (unofficial title) hooked me up with some information about this year’s registrants. For 122 attendees, this will be their first BarCamp, which is always good news. About 20% requested women’s t-shirts, so we’re assuming that they’re either women or very svelte men.
Speaking of t-shirts, I stuck the aggregate requests for t-shirt sizes into Wordle, and produced this little tag cloud:
I’m looking forward to attending and not actually speaking. I mean, in front of people. More than three people at a time. You get the idea. That said, I will be playing the role of Room Selection Bad Cop (unofficial title) during the scheduling jam.
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October 9th, 2008, 10 Comments »
I’m a big fan of Wordle. Everybody likes pretty tag clouds, but until recently, I’ve had no practical use for the tool.
What with the forthcoming election and all, and being in marketing, I thought it might be interesting to use Wordle to distill each of the four national parties’ websites into a tag cloud. The cloud would reflect the terms that the party uses most frequently on their English-language websites. With an assist from Ask Metafilter, I got them done. I’ll explain a little more about how after the clouds.
As usual, click for larger versions:
What Conclusions Can We Draw?
That’s more a question for you than me, as I haven’t spent much time trying to grok what these clouds tell us (yes, I used ‘grok’). What jumps out at you?
How Did We Make Them?
First, I grabbed a complete copy of each party’s website. I just stuck with HTML files, so if a party hosts a lot of PDFs with unique content, then that’s not reflected. The sites, of course, ended up being different sizes, and I’m relying on my site-copying software, so I can’t be certain I got all the pages.
Then we concatenated each set of HTML files into one gigantic file. Using some scripty-magic, we generated the top 100 or 250 words, each appearing as many times as they appear in the original site.
I went through each of these to clean out most or all of the leftover HTML code, navigational terms like ‘email’ or ‘newsletter’ and French words. The French is why we used 250 words in some cases. For some sites, I downloaded both the French and English version of the site, so I needed to remove the French. By working with a 250 word file, I was able to clean out the French and still have a sizable database of words.
In short, it’s somewhat unscientific, but I’m optimistic that the clouds represent a reasonably fair reflection of each site’s top content. If anyone wants to work with the content I copied, I’m happy to share it. I’m not going to publish the complete sites here, though, as I expect that would constitute a copyright violation.
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September 19th, 2007, 1 Comment »
About five months ago, after listening to endless tag advocacy from various smart people, I started a little experiment on my blog. I installed the WordPress extension Ultimate Tag Warrior, and started tagging my blog posts. You can see the tags in the footer of each post, after “Tag Testing Project”.
I tagged my posts impulsively, without much regard for selecting the best possible terms for search engine optimization. It’s been all folksonomy, all the time. For example, this post about the cat catching a big bug got tagged “cat, insect, locust, prey”. This post about a Dolph Lundgren masterpiece got tagged “bad movie, dolph lundgren, gnomedex, killer cds”.
Tags are supposed to provide SEO benefits. Have they? Let’s compare two ‘normal’ (meaning no traffic spikes) months with similar traffic numbers, one from before I started tagging and one after:
March, 2007:
56.07% of traffic comes from search engines
137 referrals from Technorati
July, 2007:
50.73% of traffic comes from search engines
82 referrals from Technorati
Huh, those seem to be going in the wrong direction. Thus far, tags seem to be having a negligible impact on my traffic levels. Maybe I’m implementing them wrong?
In any case, after the jump there’s a tag cloud of my 200 most commonly-used tags. It please me that ‘pants’ made the list.
Read more…
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