Coffee Klatch

Okay, here’s another cool technology thing I’ve found recently. It’s in the category of Social Software (like the other links I’ve got in the category in this blog’s sidebar). It’s called CommonTimes.

CommonTimes is an interactive news website that allows you to select the top stories and add your own comments. You can create your own channel and also share stories with friends. You can even create/join groups of people with common interests and see what they are reading.

It’s a GREAT concept and works very well. There are several other news-related “community” programs out there, but I think this one is by far the best.

New stories get ranked by how many times they’re read, but you can also sort by most recent, most discussed, or most bookmarked (that’s when people have added the story to their own news “channel”). All the stories that you add or bookmark get added to your channel. You can add news stories from any web page you’re viewing, even blogs (including your own). The main site and all channels are full-text searchable and can have tags applied by anyone. The tags work like they do with Flickr or any other similar program, and each page has a tagcloud for that “channel.”

One other cool thing is that everything on CommonTimes has RSS feeds! So you can subscribe to channels that you’re interested in or share your own feed with others.

It’s a very interesting and fun way to read the news and share it with others. And since other people are sharing news stories that THEY have read, it’s also a great way to find out about news that you may not have heard about otherwise.

Getting started is simple.

1. Drag the Save to CommonTimes link to your browser toolbar.
2. Visit http://www.commontimes.org/ and sign up to create your own channel.

That’s it! Give it a try!

Oh, and once you do, be sure to add me to your list of “friends” on CommonTimes. I’m the bunny with the pancake on its head. If you click on him, you’ll get my channel and there’ll be an option at the top to add me as a friend.

In conclusion, here are “Ten Ways to use CommonTimes:”

Ten Ways to use CommonTimes

1. Keep up with the latest news throughout the day.
2. Share what you’re reading on the Web with other CommonTimes readers.
3. Create a channel with your favorite news clippings and share it with your friends.
4. Follow our most popular stories.
5. Follow news from a specific section or topic with our RSS feeds.
6. Share news stories with your colleagues, friends or affinity organizations.
7. Remix the News to your own liking.
8. Share interesting stories with friends via email.
9. Share your thoughts with other users on the news of the day.
10. Put headlines from your channel or our sections and topics on your Web site or blog.

Tags are one of the hot new features online. Basically, a tag is a descriptor (metadata, if you will, that is added to something like a picture or web page or what have you so that people can find it. Flickr is a superlative example of tag usage. People can view pictures and apply tags that describe the picture in a way that’s meaningful to them. Then they can browse Flickr to find pictures with particular tags. Pretty cool! I haven’t used Flickr myself much (at least for posting my own pictures), but the tags are a very helpful element of navigating and organizing pictures.

Anyway, tag CLOUDS are a result of the proliferation of tags. A tag cloud is a group of tags that are all displayed together and that show the particular keywords that occur most frequently within the groups of tags being searched. The more frequently the term is used, the larger the text of its tag. Typically a tag cloud can be derived from either a collection of all the tags used (e.g., a collection of photos) or an examination of all the words used in the posts (e.g., an RSS feed).

Now you can create your own tag clouds based on RSS feeds. Whether it’s just one feed or a huge group of them, TagCloud.com will check the feed(s) and create a tag cloud for the most frequently used terms in the body of the articles being posted (not the lists of links in a sidebar).

And even cooler? You can click any of the tags to bring up a list (with snippets or initial paragraphs) of all the posts or stories that used the term. Just think about the possibilities here! You can create a tag cloud for one or more of the major news websites and then get a snapshot of what terms are being used the most in current news stories. And then you can click the term to get summaries and links to all of those stories. That was the original purpose for developing TagCloud, but there are many other uses that continue to add value to the Internet in possibly unforeseen ways.

It’s a whole new way to keep up with the current issues of the day. Or to see a visual representation of the core concepts of someone’s blog. Plus, they give you code to put into the head and body of your web page if you’d like to display the cloud on a web page. Or you can link to their site where they display it for you.

For example: http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/LibBlogs/default/50 is my tag cloud for a dozen of the library-related blogs that I read the most.

And http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/Headlines/default/50 is a link to a tag cloud for a collection of all the major network news sites (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, Yahoo News, and Google News). The actual Tag Cloud shows the most recent information every time it is loaded, and right now it looks like this:

FYI, my personal blog’s tag cloud is here and my professional blog’s tag cloud is here, and it’s very different from my personal blog, as I would expect. (My personal one is having issues, so it won’t load right now.)

So stop by TagCloud.com and give it a try. It’s free and quite informative!

Current music: Soundtrack from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Want to find a blog on a particular topic? Used to be you had to find one of these Blog Directories and search there, wondering if the one you want ever got submitted to that directory. Kinda like how websites used to be, until gigantic search engines were developed that used spiders (bots) to crawl the web looking for sites that link to sites that link to sites….

Well, now, just like websites, we’ve got a true Search Engine for Blogs! Google BlogSearch has a simple interface, just like regular Google, and the results first list five blog sites that match your search, followed by individual blog posts that fit your query. Pretty cool!

Their blog index is continually updated and searches a wide array of languages. Their goal is to include every blog out there that offers an RSS feed of any kind. That’s how they determine the sites that are blogs, I guess. And they even offer an RSS feed for your search results! How cool is THAT?

For more information, visit the Google BlogSearch FAQ.

Current music: Earthbeat, by Paul Winter