Visualising VoIP with a Clusty Cloud

Sunday, 8th October 2006

The search engine Clusty has a feature whereby you can generate tag clouds, as you frequently see on blogs, for particular key-phrases. I've been playing with this today. Clusty was designed from the ground up as a clustering engine (it's actually vivisimo). Here's how they describe it:-

A Clusty Cloud is a tool that webmasters or bloggers can use to instantly visualize a topic using the familiar tag cloud display. What makes the Clusty Cloud unique is that you can create a cloud based on any topic or query - you don't need tags or months of content on a subject to create an interesting cloud.

Clusty Clouds are generated using our search results for the topic you enter. Since the tags you see come from Clusty, you can click on any of them to go to Clusty's search results. Using Clusty to generate the cloud also ensures that it is always up-to-date because the clusters are generated in real-time.

Here's the Clusty word/tag cloud for the phrase "VoIP User"

I think it's quite interesting - clearly "SIP Phone" is prominent, and SIP (and IAX) is what we tend to write about the most, follow by "Blog", "Reviews", "Community" and "Problem". I hope that the latter "problem" refers to the issue solving that we often do in the forum rather than being indicative of anything else...

I think that's a pretty fair summary of what we're all about, which, when you roll it all together, is basically a form of interactive online magazine.

This starts to get quite addictive and I've been playing around with "Clusty" cloud searches for some of the industry people we know and/or read. So here are a few examples. I'm not entirely sure how Clusty works under the hood, but it's obviously word association of some sort. So this is what an automated process thinks of some of our colleagues. Apologies for the lack of colour accuracy chaps, but Clusty only allows you to choose colours from a preset selection.

James Enck

Om Malik

Andy Abramson (I know he's going to love the prominence of "Wine" in this one ;))

Jeff Pulver is a recurring theme, as you'd expect. I recommend playing around with a few key phrases, it's bound to lead to something of interest.

Skype for example leads with the tag "download". Knowing that Google works on inbound link text analysis, I thought it might be quite interesting to see where Skype "ranks" in Google for the term "download", a set of rankings which has traditionally been dominated by the inevitable giants of that phrase - Adobe Acrobat, IE, WinZIP (think where the largest volume of links with the text "download" might point to). Skype ranks at #29. Out of 2 billion results, across the massive volume of discussion topics and free tools that exist on the internet, that's mamouth. And it'll probably continue to climb.

So, what else can get from this? Well, not a great deal - I present it here for curiousity value more than anything else, but you never know, some of these produced links on VoIP related key-phrases might just churn out some interesting statistics or correlations. If you spot something interesting, please do let me know.

And finally, from the rumour mill, and completely off-topic, comes a piece of information that says that Robert Murdoch was interested at one time in buying Clusty...

Permalink | Posted by Dean @ 12:44pm on Sunday, 8th October 2006