Tagcloud

I'm happy to report that my tag cloud font distribution algorithms were able to catch the eye of Bèr Kessels -- the author of the tagadelic module -- he passed word to Steven Wittens who is helping implement logarithmic thresholding into the tagadelic module.

I chatted with Kessels and Wittens on the #drupal IRC channel this afternoon, and found out that personalized tag clouds are also on Kessels' development track. I'm still pushing group tag clouds created from different user profile identities (i.e. creating tag clouds for the tags from anti-war and pro-war identified users). More details in the 2nd & 3rd flowcharts here.

Wittens also reported that he's implementing a one-line tag cloud query in MySQL:

SELECT COUNT(*) AS count, d.tid, d.name FROM term_data d INNER JOIN term_node n ON d.tid = n.tid WHERE d.vid = 1 GROUP BY d.tid, d.name ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 60

I don't even know the syntax of MySQL yet or fully understand this. But I thought I'd share it here in case any one else might be interested.

UPDATE: Wittens responded below that he just committed the latest tagadelic version here. Here's ECP's tagadelic tagcloud

[1] A handcrafted Drupal tag cloud for all of my blog posts:
http://www.echochamberproject.com/tagcloud

[2] Tag Cloud Font Distribution Algorithm
http://www.echochamberproject.com/node/247

[3] Flowcharts for Personalized Drupal Tag Clouds
http://www.echochamberproject.com/node/245

[4] Collaborative Media with Drupal + Final Cut Pro XML
http://www.echochamberproject.com/node/219

[5] A list of all of my blog posts tagged "Theory" discussing Journalistic Paradigms with New Media technologies
http://www.echochamberproject.com/theory

[6] Swarm Intelligence Journalism
http://www.echochamberproject.com/node/151

[7] Phase 01 of the 11-phase Development Roadmap for The Echo Chamber Project
http://www.echochamberproject.com/phase01

[8] A list of all of the full-length interviews that were conducted with some transcripts posted:
http://www.echochamberproject.com/interviews

[9] A list of 13 leaders of the New Media movement interviewed at the Personal Democracy Forum
http://www.echochamberproject.com/newmedia13

[10] A cover story in the Baltimore City Paper featuring The Echo Chamber, Kent Bye & Jennifer Gouvea.
http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=7807

UPDATE 5-24-06: I have now included the source data for the charts below including term id, term name & frequency

This post is a follow-up to the previous posts here, here and here with more information on an algorithm for automating the font distribution for a Drupal tag cloud. There's also an optional alteration that would evenly distribute the font sizes across a Power Law tag frequency distribution.

I'll step through the details below with the intention of following up with some Drupal developers who will be able to code this up in PHP and provide it to the Drupal community as a module -- most likely this module could be built on top of the tagadelic module.

This has been my first attempt at specifying additional Drupal functionality in preparation for specifying other aspects of my Development Roadmap.

Being able to automatically create tag clouds, personal tag clouds and tag clouds based upon user-specified identities will be a very useful tool for visualizing the subjective context and qualitative opinions that volunteers have about interview sound bites.

My intent is to get this tag cloud development rolling to build momentum for the other aspects of the Phase 01 of my roadmap.

The remaining aspects of this post are pretty technical, but I'll include some graphics below for anyone else interested in following along...

I came up with three different flowcharts for creating different types of tag clouds in Drupal -- each one increases in flexibility and complexity.

I created a tag cloud for my website, and I'd like to see this feature added as a dynamic Drupal module. I thought I'd briefly go through the steps that I went through to give a leg up for anyone who wants to code this up in PHP.

The hardest part is the algorithm that automatically determines the distribution of font sizes based upon the frequency distribution of tags.

Below is my distribution that I used to determine the font sizes:

Notice that my tag distribution exhibits some Power Law behavior of the Long-Tail of the Internet

More technical details below...

Here is a "tag cloud" for all of the folksonomy tags used so far on EchoChamberProject.com.

You'll see all of the related posts on this site when you click on a tag.

The first tag cloud is ordered by frequency and the second is alphabetized:

New Media | Website | PR | Status | Collaboration | Drupal | Journalism | Transparency | Theory | Decentralization | Echo Chamber Project | Open Source | Film | Blog | Interview | Political | Worldview | Communications | Conference | Folksonomy | Media Criticism | Volunteer | Dialogue | International Law | Rosen | Evolution | Kent Bye | Objectivity | Plante | ToDo | Advisor | Civics | Roadmap | Wilber | About | CivicSpace | Ecosystem | Choice | Murphy | Sociology | ACH | del.icio.us | Intelligence Analysis | Science | Credibility | Distribution | Diversity | Errors | Final Cut Pro | Fundraising | Law | Philosophy of Science | Podcast | Political Bias | Activism | Analysis | CBS | Deception Detection | Editing | History | RSS | Social | Subjectivity | Vlog | ABC | AL Tubes | Economics | FCC | NYT | Sirota | Sundance | Training | Wiki | XML | Borger | Brody | Deliberation | EcoVillage | Identity | LAMP | Lobe | Maine | May | Media Logic | Metaphor | Mitchell | NBC | OHanlon | Psychology | Queen | Software | Spiral Dynamics | Strobel | Sustainability | Transcripts | Brown | Buddhism | Community | Digital Divide | Donnelly | Education | Fair Use | FireANT | Google | Human Rights | KM | Kwiatkowski | Landay | Loiseau | Math | Music | Nature | Schechter | Screencast | Sivaraksa | Skype | Social Capital | Tag Cloud | Thielmann | Thomas | Tiger | Wedgwood |

Below is the alphabetized tag cloud...