Tag Clouds. Huh. What are they good for? Absolutely nothing.
Tag clouds have suffered from designers/developers over-enthusiastic adoption of web 2.0 tricks. But when they are used appropriately they can be an intuitive and fun navigation method.
iStockPhoto
flickr.com/photos/tags
But why don’t they use tag clouds on this site?
I’ll add more examples and assign star ratings as and when I come across them.
I recently helped my Mum set up a blog.
She is an intelligent human being who is frequently made to feel stupid and frustrated because the apps she uses are unintuitive.
I set her up on blogger.com and I was actually impressed! Apart from a few minor conceptual issues, she had very little problem getting started with the interface.
The image uploader was particularly user-friendly, allowing her to re-size her massive straight-from-the-camera files into something manageable without her needing to understand pixel-dimensions and resolution.
It’s not the most sophisticated blogging platform, but I reckon blogger.com gets a few stars for being simple and effective and an application even my Mum can use.
(3 stars)
Americans turn to online videos
Online video sharing sites are reaping the benefits of the ongoing writers’ strike in the US.
According to net measurement firm Nielsen Online, some online video sites have doubled their audience since the strike began at the end of October.
I love it when the outcome of something fairly mundane is a little shove towards the future.
If Twitter facilitates ‘micro-blogging’, I’ll be ‘macro-twittering’ on this website.
I’ve never felt able to blog.
I love reading other peoples but I’ve never felt I was able to talk in enough depth about the things I’m interested in to make mine worth while.
My brain works in quite a different way.
I tend to have quite a few things buzzing around in my head at any one time. I rarely find things that hold my interest for long enough for me to produce a considered (sometimes even coherent) response.
That’s one of the reasons I love Twitter so much.
With Twitter I can extract some of the observations and enquiries rattling around inside my cranium and jot them down. There can’t be any great analysis because 140 characters doesn’t allow it. And I really like that.
When I read other people’s tweets I’m often intrigued, surprised, amused (and sometimes a bit worried!). I hope people following littleamateur experience the same range of emotion!
Hello, I'm Jenny Brown.
