As a PR professional or journalist, online research can be tedious. Imagine you wanted to learn about a company such as Blogsite (disclaimer - it’s one of MyST Technology Partners’ companies). You could go to the web site (which is really a blogsite) and try to find your way around. Or, you could go to a different type of interface - a topic cloud.
The topic cloud makes it a bit easier to drill into subjects based on keywords. And since it provides a search capablility, you can mix and match terms to get closer to content that you’re really looking for but didn’t know it existed without the tag cloud view. There are many interesting aspects of a topic cloud - here’s a paper that provides a little background.
Imagine (as a PR executive) you must review your company’s weblogs for interesting story ideas or police the blogs for things that people should’t be discussing. Topic and tag clouds would be ideal for these tasks.
Other great examples of tag clouds (not topic clouds) include Technorati and TagCloud but each have different ideas about the value and implementation. For example, TagCloud extrapolates keywords from RSS feeds, whereas MyST Topic Cloud uses real (human-generated) keywords based on each blog post; both implementations are useful.
Topic Cloud also decomposes longer key-phrases into discrete key terms. The key-phrase “Marcom Blog” would exist in the cloud as “Marcom”, and “Blog”, and each of these terms would be related and cross-referenced to the unambiguous term “Marcom Blog”. Of greatest interest - this approach begins to embrace keywords as topics, much like a topic map (see XTM), the closest specification we have to describing knowledge. As such, topic clouds are uniquely different from tag clouds.
In any case, consider tag clouds and topic clouds unique concepts that may (or may not) be important for public relations. Think about how these types of tools can be used in PR and let me know your thoughts - maybe I can help you apply this model to some use cases I haven’t considered.
