Well I finally made it to Week 7. It's taken quite a while to get here. I had forgotten the frustration of not being able to view the videos introducing each weeks lesson.
I absolutely love tag clouds. They are so useful for reference work. When I started in my current position at the library there was already a tag cloud set up on our website. Click here to have a look at it http://www.wagga.nsw.gov.au/www/html/1301-tag-cloud.asp?Thankyou=1
One of my jobs is to maintain the tag cloud i.e add new websites and delete ones that no longer work. As you can see from our site the tag cloud is no longer displaying correctly. The tags are scrunched together making it difficult to use. This is a fairly recent development which our IT guys have not been able to fix, as yet. So I would have to say that displaying a tag cloud on your website is a bit of a risk. For well over a year the tag cloud displayed fine but the problems occurred when del.icio.us upgraded their software.
Another drawback is that non functioning websites are not automatically checked and removed. This can be an issue depending on the number of bookmarks that you have. You can imagine trying to check a few hundred bookmarks on a regular basis. One last issue that we had was the number of tags. As our tag cloud grew it became more unmanageable and would no longer fit on our website in the space allowed so we decided to limit our tags and limit the number of bookmarks within each tag. It's still a work in progress and once the display is corrected we are hoping to place the tag cloud in a more accessible position on our website to highlight this great tool.
Technorati didn't do much for me and the suggested search for nswpln2008 didn't work. I think it highlights that for many of us, if something does not work the first time we never use it again. Something to be aware of with our own library websites. As for Library Thing what a great thing! Would you believe that I have even had a query at the reference desk from someone wanting books on Dewey so that they could classify their own home library. Whilst at that stage I had not tried it out myself I had heard of it and recommended it to the client. Hopefully they found it as great as I just did. Certainly a better option than Dewey, with added social options. I've put a widget at the side of this blog with a random selection of books from my library that I just created. Unfortunately they didn't display as expected but in this case near enough is good enough.
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1 comment:
Great to see you are still with Learning 2.0. Thanks for your inside view on tag clouds, on a much smaller scale - I too had display problems when I added one to my blog. The tags kept wrapping around....
Great to hear about the client who wanted to Dewey their collection - I'm sure they would have loved LibraryThing. I do!
Kathleen A.
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