Month: January 2009

The “Harry Potter Effect”

If you look at the overall keyword cloud for HotStuff 2.0, you can see librar* bloggers like to talk about libraries, books, reading, books and libraries.
When some things are more popular than others, this gives rise to Tim Spalding’s “Harry Potter Effect” — everyone’s got the HP books on their shelves, so, if you’re not careful, they end up becoming the top recommendations/suggestions for almost any type of book.
In our case, in many of the keyword clouds, “library” and “book” keep on coming out as the largest words. Whilst this is an accurate reflection of what the blogs are talking about, it does hide some of the more interesting and relevant keywords.
In honour of Mr Spalding, and at the risk of getting sued silly by Mrs Rowling, I’ve added a bit of JavaScript to toggle between a full version of the cloud (“incrementum!”) and one that can sometimes bring out more interesting/relevant keywords (“redactum!”).*
As an example, the full keyword cloud for presentation has “library” as the largest word…

…click on “redactum!” and you get a cloud with some more interesting words such as “audiences” and “interaction”…

* apologies for the cod Latin!

Another day, another bit of code…

I’ve added another bit of code to HotStuff 2.0 to try and locate blogs with similar content. In theory, the suggestions should improve as more posts are consumed (the good ol’ Network Effect) as this gives the code more data to find matches on.

For those interested in such things, the code compares the word frequencies of the blog in question with those of all the other blogs to try and locate those whose content is similar.

HotStuff 2.0 widgets

For anyone who’s interested, I’ve just posted a couple of HotStuff widgets: www.daveyp.com/hotstuff/widgets/
If you’ve got a blog which is listed, you can add a widget to show your current “Hot or Not” rating…

The second widget allows you to add a word cloud (based on either all words, words used by a specific blog, or for a specific word)…

Both widgets are available as either WordPress sidebar widgets or as embeddable JavaScript.