You are your (tag) cloud

My tag cloud for this blog is a bit rubbish, I don't create enough categories, and when I think of adding a new one, I've already blogged about it a few times and so I face the dilemma, do I now go back and republish those posts with a more appropriate tag, or do I carry on with a more general one?

Anyway, most of the blogs I read make a better job at tagging than I do, often using delicious as the means by which they categorise both their own, and others posts. It seems to me that your tag cloud becomes a sort of shorthand for your online identity. In the future we won't swap business cards (even cool Moo ones), but rather tag clouds. Perhaps dating, and recruitment services will be run by matching the compatibility between tag clouds?

So here is a quick Christmas game to test my theory. Below are the tag clouds taken from the following people:

• Tony Hirst,
• Scott Leslie
• AJ Cann
• Jim Groom
• Grainne Conole
• George Siemens
• Brian Lamb

See, if you can match the tag cloud to the blogger:

1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

6)

7)

Had a go yet?

Here are the answers, how did you do?

1) - Scott Leslie
2) - AJ Cann
3) - George Siemens
4) - Jim Groom
5) - Tony Hirst
6) - Grainne Conole
7) - Brian Lamb

Comments

[AJ Cann]

I spotted mine, but it was easy because of the subject-related tags (biology, medicine, science :-)

Is anyone else fed up with end of year review lists yet? I think I'll bung up a Wordle and use the time I save to ...

[Manish Malik]

6 = Grainne Conole was obvious...her blog colours are very unique, I did not require the cloud to recognise it :)

[Kate]

beyondgoogle is the giveaway on psychemedia's. :-)

[Jim Groom]

Martin,

This is too fun, and as I look at these clouds in comparison, I realize mine is the most directionless and least edtech, which is a source of pride. I'm surprised nothing WordPress came up, but I guess the tag cloud in my sidebar is random, the real deal is here: http://bavatuesdays.com/bavatags-2/ :)

An interesting thing about this is in many of the clouds you see a recurring pattern of interest, one thing I have used tags for, as opposed to categories, is kind of like a keyword. Which means many of my tags are one-offs, some of which will probably never be used again. Meaning it is a taxonomical nightmare, truly arbitrary to my whim. Nonetheless, that does tell you a lot about a person and their completely disorganized way of thinking and connecting. Whereas the rest seem to have a logic, and that is reflected in their cogent and actually useful posts.

[mweller]

@Jim Wordpress probably is there but I just did a quick screen grab and didn't fit it all in. What is interesting is that these are the tags we apply. A word cloud generated from our actual text eg Wordle based would be quite different.