This visualization tool first began calling my name in January 2005. I was considering how to show the shifts of the del.icio.us/url/ pages through time.

I was calling these lists and counts of tags “Tag Profiles”. I wrote a screen scraper called “TASTY” that I’ve been running since February 1, 2005. I’ll probably turn it off now, as it was rendered moot by the realization that all historical posting data can be gathered and reconstructed and doesn’t need to be snagged as time passes. It only took me over four months of thinking about this. Bah.

It became clear when seeing Carlos Rincon Sanchez’s Grafolicious tool. I immediately thumped myself on the head and wrote Cloudalicious, the title of which was inspired by Pietro Speroni’s post On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws.

Pietro then had a quick follow-up and early analysis with this new tool – Tagclouds and cultural changes.

Thanks also to Joshua Schachter’s del.icio.us, Corante’s Many-to-Many, as well as the new collaborative Tagsonomy.

Initial inspiration for wanting to see the “collective” opinion on things comes from Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and his concept of Whuffie.

- Terrell Russell – May 27 2005