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.
2 comments
2/1/2006 at 1:19 am
Emily Melton
I see that you have not gotten any feedback on this post. I’m not sure what everyone was doing last semester, but I thought I would put in my two cents.
I see the potential future use in this field for topic clouds. From a marketing or public relations perspective, it would be nice to see what blogs are saying about your product, service, company, or anything that could be of use to you.
This technology could also be utilized from a human resources standpoint by keeping track of what people in the workplace are thinking.
It opportunities of keyword clouds could be limitless, but I also see the Google search engine continuing to stay on top. This is because people generally stick with what they are comfortable with, and even though I am not very familiar with this software, the cost of learning the new way and how much searching ease gained, may not be worth it.
Just some of my thoughts. Thank you for posting!
2/1/2006 at 6:06 pm
Brandie
Until reading your post, I was unfamiliar with topic and tag clouds; and by “unfamiliar” I mean I had never heard of them. The closest references I had were meta tags on websites.
However, your post and links not only made me aware of topic and tag clouds, but also provided me with information about what they are and how they can be beneficial.
One of the first things that came into my head regarding the benefits was that these could eliminate potential PR nightmares. We all know how people like to talk; and we all know how easy it is for rumors to get started and run rampant. It doesn’t take long for simple statements or speculations to snowball into PR disasters.
Well, since blogging is an increasingly popular tool, as well as hobby, there’s a strong possiblility that these comments and speculations could either start on a blog or make their way to one rather quickly. This being the case, a PR professional, using a tool such as a topic cloud, would be far more likely to discover this sooner. Then he/she could take immediate action to make necessary corrections or clarifications before the snowball effect kicked in.
This may, in fact, be too dramatic and may take things a little too far; but anything’s possible, right? Regardless, I can absolutely see the potential for the benefits in PR from topic clouds.