ResearchBuzz

I like tag clouds. I like eBay. So when I find out about a site that lets you look at eBay as a tag cloud, I like that too. Auction Cloud is available at http://www.auctioncloud.com/ .

The front page shows a tag cloud for a single category (I think the category is random.) Click on a tag to get a list of auctions for that keyword. You can also browse the entire list of categories and subcategories.

I must confess I was kinda surprised at what some of these clouds looked like. For example, I looked at the video game category cloud, expected to see a giant wii tag. Nope, the giant tags were psp and xbox. So maybe it’s just the systems auctions, I thought, and looked up the systems category. Nope, that one has psp and xbox 360 as the hot tags.

Looking at the about page I see that the clouds are not actually for the listings, but for searches performed on eBay. That’s interesting too. What would be really interesting would be some kind of way to do on-the-fly comparisons between the popularity of a certain keyword as a search term and as a keyword in auctions. So you might find that Wii has x percent prevalence as a search term, and y number of listings associated with it.

Meanwhile you might find that another keyword has extensive prevalence as a search term, but almost no listings — a demand gap that you could rush to fill, you wily ol’ entrepreneur you. (By the way, what’s it called when you build a cloud based on both keyword frequency and comparison with another data point? Intersect Cloud? Quant Cloud? Something else?)

Quick loading and it’s fun to browse through the categories. If you’re interested in eBay this is worth a look.

Stephen Arnold has launched a new publication called GGReport. It’s designed to provide information about using Google’s technology in government sectors. The site for the publication’s at http://www.ggreport.com/.

The announcement said that government employees could receive the publication for $99 a year, with others getting the subscription for $399 a year. However the Web site says government employees (and non-profits) can get the publication for $50 a year, with others paying $350. 17 issues a year are anticipated. If you’re willing to provide your name, e-mail address, and organization name, you can get a free sample issue from the Web site.

It seems like the Internet is really great at organizing things on the macro level (countries and states) and less so at the microlevel (streets and neighborhoods.) It might just be axiomatic that the smaller the group, the less public the communications. At any rate there is a site available that’s tracking over 3000 neighborhoods in over 50 cities. Outside.in’s available at http://outside.in/ .

From the front page you can do a city or zip code search, as well as browse featured neighborhoods and cities. I did a search for my old favorite, 90210. What I got was a list of blog entries focused on the Los Angeles area, as well as a list of top tags, and a blogroll (there was only one blog on the blogroll, but there were several blogs represented on the blog entries list, and you can suggest blog entries or entire blogs for particular areas.) That particular zip code had 43 entries; in comparison 10016, which is New York, had 40 items. Each zip code has its own RSS feed so you can keep up in your feed reader.

In addition to the column of blog posts there’s also a column for events; even for the New York City region, though, this list was woefully thin. The site does encourage visitors to submit their site and blog posts for inclusion, though.

This is not something I often say but I think this site would be well-served by mashing up a bit. If one took event listings from other sites, job listings from places like Monster, and maybe even entries from Craigslist, this resource would be fleshed out a lot and would still have the unique content afforded by blog posts sorted by geographical area. Would there be some way to filter that in? (Ooo ooo! And Topix.) There’s already a good number of areas here, and I like the fact that they are so vigorously encouraging submissions, but there’s a lot of fleshing out to be done. Worth a look if they’re covering your city.