in search of better tag cloud algorithms

Tag clouds (aka text clouds or word clouds) first appeared on the web around 2004-2005, most notably on Flickr. It took a little while for me to warm up to them, but once I accepted the idea, I found them useful to spot patterns that didn’t strike me previously in linear form.

(Digg used to have a great tag cloud, if anyone knows how to get it back let me know!)

WordPress and bbPress have halfway decent tag clouds, but they are missing some additional features I’ve seen on other clouds.

bbPress turns 2 today! Happy Birthday bbPress!

bbPress turns 2 years old today!!!

It’s been a big year with new features being added at a rapid pace thanks to hard work by Sam and Mike. It’s an easy guess that we should see a stable 1.0 beta by the end of 2008.

But don’t let the modest sounding “1.0″ fool you, it’s practically a “2.0″ inside with all the changes since 0.9 including BackPress integration (merges core functions from WordPress) and an XML-RPC api like WordPress as well.