I have been fascinated with tag clouds for about two days now and in a recent search for a flex badge ran across this post for what i don’t knOw. But it sparked an idea…
Imagine a blank badge that was an embedded flex application on the right of your site. By highliting text somewhere on the page that you were reading and dragging the text to the app, the aapp would (in an ajax fashion) build an index of all the pages within the site that had that text within them, sizing the dragged phrase relative to the number of results that were returned. Clickin on the ntry would fade all of the entries to the bg color and bring up a list with brief description of articles that contained that entry. Clicking on that article would take the user to that article’s page.
The owner of the site could define a defaut set or function, and each user could develop their own-stored locally in a shared object.
Monetizing would be ad based as you woud have a dB of each users interests for the genre of that web site and could quickly produce relevant ads. The real quetion is how to get user to use it and how to get sit owners to distribute it. Giving the app away for free and tying the user generated tags. To finer granulated statistics is one option. However adding some soccial functionaity to allow each user to share their findings (through the twitter protocol?) could enhance awarenes and increase adoption
