This week’s 4cast:
1. Head in the Tag Clouds
A tag cloud is a visual way of identifying popular content on any given website through the prevalence of keywords or tags (see Flickr, Technorati, and del.icio.us for well-known examples). A few libraries have experimented with tag clouds as a way for patrons to navigate their catalogs, news, or other online resources.
- Library Thing Tag Cloud (Blog about Libraries)
- Search terms as tag clouds (The Horseless Library)
- US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud (chir.ag)
- Clever Use of Tag Clouds (RSS4Lib)
2. Search Gets Personal
A variety of search engines are trying to give their results a more human-like feel, whether that means offering live human guides to assist searchers (see ChaCha) or creating a saucy, virtual guide to egg you on (see Ms. Dewey). Actual quality of search results may vary.
- ChaCha leaves Alpha and goes to Beta (Stephen’s Lighthouse)
- ChaCha Search: Take Two (SearchEngineWatch)
- Ms. Dewey (BiblioTech Web)
- I smell a cease-and-desist letter (LibraryThing)
3. To Library 2.0 or Not To Library 2.0?
If you’re still finding it difficult to grasp Library 2.0 (either in principle or in practice), there are several gigantic lists of links and examples to further enlighten and/or overwhelm you.
- Library 2.0 Roundup (Life as I Know It)
- Nov. 14th SirsiDynix Institute Links (Stephen’s Lighthouse)
- I want to – a page of utilities that help you do stuff you want to Web 2.0 applications (Phil Bradley’s weblog)
4. Meanwhile, the World Starts Talking About 3.0
While libraries are still waking up to the possibilities of Web 2.0 applications, other industries are already peering beyond.
- Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense (New York Times)
- Web 3.0! (Free Government Information)
- The Road to the Semantic Web (Read/Write Web)
- Web 3.0 – Humanity Vs. the Machines (Innovation Creators)
