Saturday, July 21, 2012

A Trip Down Tag Lane

One thing I wanted to get out of this blog, besides the fame and fortune, is the tag cloud.  That's the "Labels" box you see at the side of the page, assuming you're using the full-size desktop-oriented version of the site.  The size of the labels represents the number of times it's been used. 

I was curious how much each topic would come up.  It seems popular culture and sports pop up a lot, since those seem to be easy to write about, but not necessarily my two favourite topics.  Britain, Canada and Facebook seem to come next, the three places I've spent most of my life.  That's followed by books, movies, music, politics and technology, all things I spend much more time on.  It seems that the formula for how often something appears in my blog is the amount of time I spend thinking about a topic, times the amount of annoyance that it gives me.  I sort of pay attention to pop-culture and sports, but find both full of aggravation. 

But then there are all those one-time-only tags.  For instance, I have a "Kony" tag, for the one time I talked about the Kony2012 video. In my defence, I have to point out that when I started out I assumed that the Tag Cloud Gadget would only show the most-often used labels, and leave out the singletons.  So I just happily attached any labels I felt like.  When my first post was about Angelina Jolie's dress at the Oscars, I added "Angelina" and "Oscars" as labels.  But it always shows all the labels.  Since then I've learned not to create any labels I'm unlikely to use again.  So I wrote a whole article about Chaz Bono without a special label.  But still, that tiny "Angelina" tag has been sitting at the top of the cloud ever since, never growing any bigger.  It will probably still be there years from now when this is blog is an indelible part of popular culture beloved by millions.  Hopefully it will at least mean that Angelina Jolie will make an appearance in the movie adaptation.

No comments:

Post a Comment