Tag - but not the theater

I mentioned Andrew Fry below, who Simpsonized himself. But I want to also mention that he has a very cool post over on his site about Tag Clouds. What are Tag Clouds, you ask? Well, notice at the bottom of posts I will sometimes tag what's contained in it

For example my post on hosting out of town guests in Seattle is tagged Tacoma, which is the key word I can use that lands a post of FeedTacoma; St. Helens Neighborhood, which I use when I'm doing hyper-local blogging and talking about the goings-on within a few blocks of me; and Restaurants, because I mention a few.

The idea is that if you like an article that discusses Obama or Urban Studies you can read more about that topic by just clicking the tag.

Well, tags are also an interesting visual way to assess whether a site has something you're interested in. By scanning through tags and their frequency, a Tag Cloud can show what is discussed regularly and makes that word bigger. Here's mine, courtesy of Andrew's hard work on technorati:


Tacoma scores high, with theater and Horatio noticeable as well. I like that "The Issues" scores high, too, since that's the tag I use when I'm ranting about something. And "travel blogging," which I love to do as well (both the traveling and the travel blogging, actually).

It's a cool way to look at a site. After two years of blogging I can look back and say ... "Oh, so that's what I was interested in." Not that it's been a secret or anything, but it's fun to see the trends.