Our developers thought it might be interesting to provide a look into what the community as a whole was exploring. What topics are capturing the imagination today? Which ideas are cascading through the community most quickly. In short, what’s hot, right now?
Starting today in Gather Labs, we are pleased to provide a look at what a few of our developers have been building behind the scenes. We are launching three pages (Hot Posts, Hot Photos, and Hot Videos) that show what the most explored tags and titles are each hour.
How does it work? Every hour, we identify the tags of the most read content on the site. We use the top tags to create a “tag cloud” which shows what people are paying attention to this hour on Gather. The tags are listed alphabetically, so you can scan the list for ones that you are interested in more easily. The size of the tags in the cloud represents their popularity.
Below the cloud, we list the most popular ten tags, and three of the most read items each hour that use that tag. (Tip: hit refresh and you will see the same tags, but a new selection of articles below each). We’ll also show an indicator beside each tag if it is climbing or falling in the rankings from the prior hour (a +1 means it move up one spot and a -4 would show that it had fallen four spots against its peers).
We do the exact same thing for images and videos, on separate pages. It’s interesting to see how different the tags are for these different media formats already.
Please remember that this is a Gather Labs project so the usual Gather Labs rules apply. That means it is experimental. It is not supported. It may or may not become part of the overall Gather experience someday (in this flavor or another). And it may go away without warning. That said, we invite you to hop on into our sandbox and play.
And please, let us know what you think. Thanks!
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Comments: 35
Maybe we can get the Gallery of Regrettable food posts in their also.
Thanks.
see about looking through Gather for relavent photos. it will help to highlight members
and gee, just what i always wanted. more things screaming politics at me. it's bad enough all i've seen for the most part on this site has been political posts, now i'm going to have more of that blaring at me in the face along with religion tags.
basically what i'm saying is NO THANK YOU!
I hate 'tag clouds' on other sites . . . which goes to reason I will hate them here. I think it's a rather juvenile way to show what is popular on the site. Maybe it's just because I have a thing against non-uniform text sizes in a document. *shrug*
Along with politics and religion, CC, we can look for GAME: Words A-Z as a popular tag too.
*Bzzz* back to the drawing board Gather Techies . . . :)
the page looked fine ~ will look again, tomorrow ~ thanks ~j