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Head’s in the Cloud

And Bird's the Word

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 | Posted by Aaron Goldman

Posted In: About Connectual

Yesterday I launched a tag cloud for Testimonials created by the crack team at Elevate Studios. This idea was the brainchild of Dan Kuthy of Snuggie Pub Crawl and Blue Chip SEO fame. He pointed out that the old way the testimonials were laid out was a bit clunky to navigate and, frankly, (my words, not his) no-one really cares that much about me to read 100+ LinkedIn recommendations linearly.

Dan has been enamored for some time by TheBirdsTheWord.net -- a nifty little tool created by Resolution Media colleague and co-founder of the Snuggie Pub Crawl, David J. Barnes -- as a way to semantically link various concepts. Unfortunately, David has a day job (and takes classes at night) so that doesn't leave him much time to do things like create an API for the site so anyone can tap into its mapping capabilities. (Get on that man!)

So, for the time being, we had to limit the tags to basic correlations -- eg, "connections" = "connected." I did have some fun with it, though. As I tweeted, it wasn't clear whether a phrase like "Rap Skills" should be classified as "Charisma" or "Communicate" so we just created a tag for "Rapper."

Going through this process, I was again humbled by the incredible support shown by my peers in the space. I promise not to let all the tags in the cloud go to my head.