About two months ago I started using the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to save and tag my favorite news stories. A couple hundreds links later, I've built a nice collection. Below you can find the tags I've selected displayed visually.

If you've never seen one, this is what is known as a tag cloud. The crowd over at Wikipedia defines it this way:

A Tag Cloud is a text-based depiction of tags across a body of content to show frequency of tag usage and enable topic browsing. In general, the more commonly used tags are displayed with a larger font or stronger emphasis. Each term in the tag cloud is a link to the collection of items that have that tag.

While it makes for a fun little toy, the whole effort is certainly hampered by capricious and inconsistent coding on my part. At its core, this project is founded on mapping complex news stories to simple nominal categories for quantitative analysis. Because the creation and execution of my coding routines have been, to be kind, pretty loose, you shouldn't expect more than a foggy view on the perculiarities of how I consume and categorize news. For insight into the news itself, it's best you trust the professionals.

Should anyone be interested, you can track a feed of my latest links in the left side bar under the heading Ben's News Bag -- also available via RSS -- and keep up with the news cloud here or on my media diet page, where I've installed an identical module just above my blogroll.

This is a post Ben Welsh made on February 12, 2007

It is filed with other posts about the news.

Topics include data visualization, del.icio.us, media, my life, quantitative analysis, web and widget.

Some similar posts are "Ben's News Bag," "The sweet spot between punditry and misanthropy," "Rock over Google! Rock on DC!," "What's the Standard Issue?" and "Ben's Bookshelf"