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You are currently browsing the Bogle’s Blog weblog archives for the day Tuesday, June 7th, 2005.

TagCloud Beta– create keyword clouds for any set of sites

TagCloud - Home: “What is TagCloud?
TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feed you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.”

TagCloud automatically creates a flickr style tag cloud based on keywords in any sets of feeds you want. I’ve created a tag cloud for Jobster so you can see what we’re talking about. I also made the cloud available in my sidebar by including a snippet of Javascript.

Cloud publishing should really be integrated as a feature into one of the other place where you maintain lists of feeds. (I can see this is a checkbox on my bloglines subscription list, for example.) The hardest part was having to re-enter all of the sites one by one.

Turnabout: open source plugin for IE user scripts

Get Turnabout: “Turnabout is a plugin for Internet Explorer that runs user scripts of your choice on any website. User scripts are like plugins for websites. They can enhance your web experience in a lot of ways… Essentially, Turnabout does for IE what Greasemonkey does for Firefox.”

Turnabout is another implementation of the GreaseMonkey concept for IE. Compared with Trixie, it has several advantages. The developer includes source code and permission to modify and distribute the source code and binaries. In addition, the plugin has no external dependencies on .Net or anything else, so the required download size is small.

The downside appears to be that fewer working user scripts are included with the product, but that appears to be primarily a licensing issue that will get worked out over time.

UPDATE: The author of Trixie has decided to throw in the towel in deference to Turnabout. Even if you’re a Firefox fan, as I am, it’s reassuring to know that Greasemonkey innovations have at least the potential of being accessible to anyone regardless of browser choice.