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Mar 25 2009

Tag Cloud Computing? – Categories, Keywords, SEO, Tags, Getting to Simplicity

Category: executive learnings,social media — jmacofearth @ 10:48 am

The tag cloud is dead.

Cloud computing is merely a new marketing term for web services and support.

How can we simplify our web experience so that what we are paying attention to is what is important in our lives. And how do we filter out the tags (blow away the dark clouds and fog) are obscuring our goals. What exactly should we be paying attention to? It is a question we need to ask ourselves much more often these days. Or we find ourselves looking back on the day and into the night with a lot of work still to get done before we can sleep.

So one of my objectives for 2009 is to Simplify my Tag Cloud. I mean this both physically, mentally and spiritually. Because where the brain and mind are foggy so is our self, so is our core person. And by eliminating the noisy distractions of tweets, tags, feeds and emails, tv shows and advertisements for the better life, news and propaganda about global wars and warming, the better we are at eliminating the clutter of our online data stream, the more effective we will be an accomplishing our tasks and goals.

And in the long run, accomplishing more of your goals is a big deal.

So let me share my uber-tags first. These are not often written down, but in a drawing I did the other day, trying to explain what I am doing to simplify my priorities, I came up with a pretty good short list; TOP TAGS if you will.

work
family
play/creativity
health/exercise
spiritual practice

Now let me compare that with my current "category nav" from this website.

uber.la categories as navigation

I think I have them all pretty well slotted with my TOP TAGS. I might need to add a "husband" category of some sort, or a better title than "ho-dad parenting" to cover the entire "family" spectrum. But I pretty much leave my personal work, relationship work, out of my writing. On the blog any way. ;-)

And I might add tennis as it is my main "fun" and "exercise" activity. But it is actually caught in my "about" and "contact" pages. So I need to add my top-of-the-page nav as well.

uber.la's top nav as a tag cloud of life

And so with these added in as cross-tag meta categories I do cover all of my TOP TAGS.

But now, for comparison, let me show you some of the tag cloud structures that I have elsewhere.

delicious top 10 tags for john32mac

And here is the larger list from delicious. The bolder tags have more pages associated with them.

500+ tags on delicious

And one more from delicious that I really like. On this one, you get to see my entire 560 tags (as of 3-25-09) in order of priority. And as the number of links decreases the type is not only smaller but lighter in color as well.

delicious tag cloud of all tags in descending order

And of course I could not fit all 560 tags onto a single screen shot, but you get the idea. And the image links to my delicious pages so you can go see for yourself, if you are interested.

Okay, so here is a cloud of my Twitter tags.

Oh boy, I need to get something to talk about besides ME! Gosh!

And last example, a random cloud from a blog I frequent.

a tag cloud of mess in my opinion

[Okay, so now I need a big wrap.]

Clouds are dead except for specific uses. But most clouds just do not work in the business space. Because someone would need to go back and clean up the tags on a regular basis. Cause what I call "web 2.0" you call "web2" and the next guy calls "social media." And most sites, business and friendship, do not do any tag cleanup.

In our personal lives tag clean up, and refocus on the BIG TAGS is essential.

Here is something David Foster Wallace said about his writing. "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today," he once said, "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it."

And that is our task, dear reader, to filter down the noise from our lives and pay attention to the TOP TAGS. Or as Covey put it in his matrix, the Not-Urgent but Important quadrant.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/big-tags

See Also: Rolling Stone's bio of David Foster Wallace

Tags: big tags, cloud, cloud computing, covey, covey matrix, dfw, getting real with twitter, getting webwork done, infinite jest, information overload, jmacofearth, lifestreaming tools, my bosses's boss, not-important, organizing your tags, simplify, simplifying the cloud, social media, social media success, tagcloud, tags, the big tags, tools, top tags

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Dec 25 2008

The 8 Laws of PowerPoint Success

Category: career,executive learnings,speed the web,tech opinion — jmacofearth @ 7:08 am

And speaking about decks… Oh the powerpoint presentation… Much maligned, much feared, much bored of our our skulls watching.

But… We've got to communicate. And often it is my "deck" that goes to my bosses' boss, the VP of something or other and my slides are left to sell or fail. All alone. No reality distortion possible. No influence of my energy, my excitement. And of course no feedback from the VP either. Occasionally I'll get a "she liked it." Most likely I'll learn nothing of the lofty discussions or the VP's expression of approval or boredom.

There are a couple fundamental things to remember when doing your deck that I have learned while building, tweaking and presenting a couple hundred powerpoint decks.

[Before I get into the tips, there is one memorable observation that has stuck with me ever since I heard it. One of my managers [my mentor] was talking about the importance of decks and she said, "If your slide doesn't make it to the VP deck that tells you something." POW! Sure does! And when none of your projects make it into your manager's quarterly summary presentation… Well, the word "toast" comes to mind. As it recently did for my entire team.]

Some of my ideas are not original, actually many of them are taken from studying the following folks. Guy Kawasaki, Edward Tufte, David Armano and are captured in many voices on the following blogs Presentation Zen, 37 Signals and Beyond Bullet Points. And this post The Good, Bad and Ugly of Powerpoint has great links to powerpoint expertise all over the place.

Always have one killer slide [When you get to this slide it is okay to forget your pace and timing, if the discussion is successful this slide can provide you the illustration to make the close.]
Keep the executive's time in mind and focus on their priorities [Usually they don't want to chat, they want the numbers/metrics, the facts to back them up, and the impact on their line of business, period!]
Charts and graphs are pretty but distracting if not simple [If they don't support #2 delete them.]
No more than 4 bullet points per page [Bullet point are your succinct ideas, if you are reading them they are too long and too many.]
One typeface, no more than 2 (maybe 3) weights [Specifically: san-serif or serif, big in slide title, smaller in bullet points, and maybe smaller in sub-bullets, but reference #4 above before using sub-bullets.]
No more than 10 slides [Unless you have all day with your audience you should spend the time presenting not reading your slides. If it IS an all day event then you can have 25 slides.]
Executives like numbers and proof better than opinions [Never has this been more apparent than in my current position. When your audience is full of "experts" you may not have to prove the idea that advertisements within a social community are a risky option, but when the executive is demanding ROI on your community project, you will have to show your research.
If you don't get a slide in the VP's deck you are toast [Any questions on this one?]