I created a tag cloud from all the KM feeds I pull into Bloglines and placed it in the right side-bar. TagCloud is the nifty little beta service that makes it happen! In their own words:
TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds 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 lets you create and manage clouds with content you are interested in, and let’s you publish them on your own website.
I would like to reverse the process and create my tag cloud and have a service find the appropriate feeds for me. Someone working on that?
Isn’t the “related feeds” thing on Bloglines close to what you want? … Ah, but you want feeds related to everything you read, not just a specific blog. Would that be Bloglines recommendations?
You might also have a look at some of the other blog search tools. Waypath has the interesting feature that it will inform you of posts that seem to be most closely related to your overall blog — as well as to posts that are related to an individual entry.
Yes, those are close. I guess what I’m looking for is a better user experience. I think unsophisticated users would have an easier time putting together a list of keywords and then looking at the results from a tag cloud than they would compiling a list of feeds and then studying the related feeds option in Bloglines or similar. The presentation is better. The problem with tagcloud as it now stands is the amount of user knowledge required to effectively use it.