Instant Syndicating Standards

One of the main features of ISS is the ability to discover friends’ current interests by viewing their tag cloud. A tag cloud is a visual representation of the most popular tags in a given time frame. The Figure below shows a tag cloud for Debbie for September 2006. The most popular tags are Health, Spirituality and Yoga; followed by Dance, Education, Music, Romance and Shopping. To create a tag cloud, it's necessary to compare how many entries there are for each tag in a given time frame. The more entries it has compared to other tags, the bigger it appears.

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Besides size, colors also play an important role in tag clouds. The colors of the tags represent the incoming and outgoing flow of information. The blue color is for tags that have an incoming flow (e.g. Nick receives information from Debbie's Friends tag). The red color is for tags that have an outgoing flow (e.g. Nick sends information to Debbie's Spirituality tag). The purple color is for tags that have a mutual flow (e.g. Nick receives and sends information about Art from and to Debbie). Finally, the black color is for tags that have no flow of information (e.g. Nick and Debbie don’t exchange information about Environment – yet).

Let us suppose Nick is interested in receiving entries from Debbie that has been tagged with Environment. All he has to do is to select Debbie’s Environment tag to see the latest entries she has written about the Environment. If he is truly interested in subscribing to Debbie’s Environment tag, then all he has to do is associate Debbie’s Environment tag with one of his tags.

Retrieving Debbie's TagCloud in XMPP: