Aaron Bassett wrote up a cool concept/article on using a “Focus Cloud” instead of the usual Tag Cloud (link to explanation and picture on Wikipedia) for conveying popular categories/tags.

From the Article:

For example when the iPhone was announced bloggers all over the world started talking about it. I would guess that for some of them it would have been the first time any apple product got a mention on their blog. But suddenly its what everyone is talking about. So if we looked at all the tags for all their posts iPhone would be a tiny little spec. But if we had visited their blog during the inital buzz period it would have been the main focus.

So a Focus Cloud should show not what has been the most popular tags overall, but what is the most popular tags at present. What is your current focus.

Basically, he has a good idea in turning the “point system” around a bit. If you know how tag clouds work, you might already understand how all this is working. In the comments section, he had this to say about the scoring:

Rather than penalizing a tag for being used a long time ago, I decided to reward those used recently. This way I hope allows new tags a chance to gain traction while still allowing more established tags to receive some attention as well.

I think it’s a great idea, and I’m very grateful that he was willing to share the PHP code for implementing this as well.

The End.

Mmm… potluck. (free food!)

The End.