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You may be aware that the Internet is becoming very crowded. Google will attempt to help you get where you want to go, but is having increasing difficulties. Part of that is Google’s doing. Their methodology depends on links from other web pages, so naturally, everyone is producing web pages. Indeed, some use computer software to generate thousands of web pages to influence their Google ranking. Since Google will only use computer based algorithms, it becomes a battle of the giant computers.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, seems to be acknowledging that his protégé has problems. He has accepted one of the Knight News Challenge 2008 awards for a project that will create a technology to give users more information about the origins and sourcing of digital content. He will be working with the BBC and Reuters on what has been dubbed “source tagging“.

Tags To Bring Order To The Cyber Sphere

Tagging certainly seems to be something that has real potential in helping us all navigate our way through the World Wide Web. Tags do of course come in two flavors. You can take a body of text and use a computer to determine what are the most frequently used terms. That is one way and it may be the route that Sir Tim is following. What is much more powerful is to encourage authors to choose a few tags that they feel will best represent their work. Thankfully this version seems to be attracting more and more attention, perhaps given the problems that Google is having with computer based algorithms.

A good example of the approach can be seen in the excellent blog of Kate Trgovac. Just look at her post on links for 2008-05-13. You will find for every entry she has added tags. If you wish to see more on what she believes is important on any given tag, then you can click through on that tag. There you will find the favorites she has collected, which are typified by that tag. She is using the website, del.icio.us, to hold these favorites. That is a free service and anyone can do it.

Picturing Tags - The Tag Cloud

If you want to get a sense of what Kate Trgovac feels is important and worth tagging, how can you best do that? The del.icio.us website does give a listing of all the tags she has used (1203 in all at the moment) with the numbers of web pages for each tag. Such a long listing is a little indigestible, so a visual approach seems more appropriate. This is where the tag cloud comes in. You can see a mini-example at the top of the right sidebar. Perhaps we should mention that the tagcloud.com website is somewhat confusing here, since it seems to be only a register of RSS newsfeeds.

If you’re working with del.icio.us, it would be nice to be able to easily display a tag cloud of your favorites. Nick Bouton seems to have attempted that in 2005 but apparently ran into problems with the server capabilities of the del.icio.us website.

It is perhaps an indication of the attraction of tag clouds that a number of people have worked on appropriate software. Eric (engtech) developed one in 2007, which was somewhat complex. If you can accept complexity, then you may even be tempted to use a Flash Tag Cloud WordPress plugin that Alex Cristache found. It is one developed by Roy Tanck and is called WP Cumulus, in a pleasing play of words on the notion of a tag cloud.

WordPress Has A Tag Cloud Feature

Luckily for those who are enthusiastic about tag clouds, and are authors of WordPress blogs, the whole situation has become dramatically simpler. With the latest upgrade (version 2.5), tags are now much more effectively supported. In particular, there is now a template tag function, wp_tag_cloud. That makes the addition of a mini tag cloud to a sidebar almost child’s play. You may have noticed a small example in the right sidebar when you arrived at this blog.

Making Your Very Easy WordPress Tag Cloud Web Page

Displaying the full set of tags generated for a blog is clearly inappropriate for a sidebar display. What is much preferable is a web page displaying the full set of tags. As it turns out, with a little ingenuity there is a very simple way of creating such a web page. This is done by creating a specific page template just for that page, which we suggest should be named tags.php. A suitable code for this in the basic Kubrics theme is shown below.

<?php /*
Template Name: Tag Cloud
*/ ?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">

<?php if ( function_exists('wp_tag_cloud') ) : ?>
<div style="margin:25px;border:1px solid #111;padding:15px;">
<ul  style="margin:0 0 0 8px;padding:0;">
<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=24&number=0'); ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

<p style="margin-left:33px;">
Tags:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tagcloud" rel="tag">tagcloud</a>
 in Technorati |
<a href="http://del.icio.us/bwelford/tagcloud" rel="tag">tagcloud</a>
 in del.icio.us</p>
</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

An example of the output can be seen in the tag cloud page for this blog. The only point to note is that the tags shown below the tag cloud are not a natural feature of a WordPress blog page. Wordpress posts do have tags, but WordPress pages do not, unless they are added manually as is done here. The left-hand tagcloud tag for Technorati is applicable to all tag clouds and can be left as is. The right-hand link for the del.icio.us tagcloud can be modified to link to the individual author’s del.icio.us tagcloud favorites, if so desired.

You can copy and paste the above code to create your own tags.php file and it can be FTP-ed to your own Theme folder. The properties of this file should be set to Read and Write for the Owner and Read only for others.

Once the tags.php file has been uploaded, the Tag Cloud web page is very easily created as a New Page in the ‘Write Page’ Subpanel. Select the template to be used at the very bottom of the Subpanel from the drop-down list. Its name is Tag Cloud. In the Title field, type a suitable Title such as ‘Tag Cloud for this Blog’. Within the Content field, type the text which should appear as the heading within the Page and this is all that is required. This could appear as follows:

<h2>Tag Cloud for this Blog</h2>

The template will then automatically add in the complete tag cloud together with the two tag links for tagcloud which appear below it.

Once the Tag Cloud Web Page has been created, a link to it can then be displayed at an appropriate point on the Home Page. Visitors to the blog can then easily use it to get a sense of what subjects the blog covers.

Related:
Tags Attract Eyes
Tag Clouds To Guide You

Tiffani Mozingo, administrator for the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) at Sky Lakes Medical Center, in Klamath Falls, Ore. had some dramatic news to report at a recent Medicexchange conference on patient safety. The PACS expedited diagnosis and treatment by getting radiological information into physician’s hands more quickly and with greater accuracy.

Use of this technology enabled Sky Lakes to reduce average TAT (turnaroundtime) for normal reports to the emergency room from almost 78 hours in November 2006, to 5.4 minutes in November 2007. Abnormal reports take less than 15 minutes. The reporting system also yielded a substantial economic benefit. Once Sky Lakes went “live” with the reporting suite, the hospital was able to reassign all 10 of its radiology transcriptionists.

This represents an astonishing improvement, and shows the potential for the immediacy and efficiency of speech technology. It suggests an exponential growth in a wide variety of uses for voice recognition software.

Move over, small world, it’s a sound world after all. You might be surprised to see (or perhaps to hear) how much speech technology is impacting your own personal world, as compared with say 12 months ago. Clearly, this is not a silent revolution, but you could be forgiven if you had not spotted the changes. Sound is really the killer app. .. and that’s before we hear the impact of the major initiatives that Microsoft and Google have in hand.

Some things are almost imperceptible. Six months ago, you would call your telecom supplier and were frustrated by the experience. You wanted to press zero just to cut through the electronic thicket and get someone who could understand you. If you had an accent, it was even tougher. Call today and in many cases your virtual assistant will do as well as a skilled and well-trained agent could ever have done.

Of course voice to voice is not too difficult. Human beings sometimes have difficulty talking to each other, so we are somewhat forgiving. The much greater challenge is voice to text. Indeed, many readers are sticklers about fine points of grammar and typos. Luckily, most document software has spell checkers. That means that the worst mistakes (typos) can be caught.

This post is being written using Dragon Naturally Speaking software. By now I have trained it reasonably well so it requires few corrections, even with only a modest microphone. This is a growing trend, as you can see by checking on other blog posts. The one that triggered my writing this post read as follows:
If you have cash higher personalities and market leaders for brand association and exposure.
Clearly the author meant to say:
If you have cash, hire personalities and market leaders for brand association and exposure.

Then this morning, a much more visible example showed up on that excellent blog by Andy Nulman. The title read as follows, Changing The World Once Cellphone at a Time. That clearly is an example of a speako.

Some like Eric Bakovic or Adam Albright question whether that is the best term. Would talko or mistalk be better? Well my vote is for speako. The problem is that, since the computer made the speako and it is not mis-spelled, a spell checker does not spot any mistake.

It’s a fascinating subject. There is a discussion at Cre8asite Forums on this if you’re interested. That even branches into the subject of your blog talking back to you. Check out A.L.I.C.E or PandoraBots if you’d like to see where this is all heading.

Ending breast cancer is a cause we can and should all support. So many families are affected by it. It’s not surprising that a great number of people get involved in trying to help. One very powerful way is in raising donations. Many thousands do it through the Weekend to End Breast Cancer�. If you check out their website, you will find that 60-kilometres weekend runs are being arranged again this year right across the country.

• Ottawa June 6-8
• Calgary July 25-27
• Edmonton August 8-10
• Halifax August 15-17
• Montreal August 22-24
• Toronto September 5-7
• Vancouver September 5-7

You can get an idea of what has been achieved by looking at the 2007 results in Vancouver. As is noted, over 2,000 participants walked 60-kilometres through several neighbourhoods around Vancouver during the Weekend to End Breast Cancer and raised $5.1 million. Proceeds benefit the BC Cancer Foundation, funding important breast cancer research, education, services and care.

If you want to get involved here in Vancouver, then the Vancouver End Cancer website provides full information. More immediately you could look at a short Video, which opens in a new window, by clicking on this button:

I’m proud to say my wife Vivianne has decided to take part in this. If you would like to support her, then you can visit her website and make a donation. Any amount, large or small, will be much appreciated. If you like what you read for free on this and the other SMM blogs and newsletters, then this could be a good way to show your appreciation. It certainly beats those [Buy Me A Beer] buttons that some blogs carry.

If you know of someone else who is participating and would like to support them, or wish to make a donation directly, then this link will get you there.

QuickTax is the Intuit Canada program that infuriated me into writing this blog post. I might have written a similar post some time back when Intuit Canada forced me to upgrade my version of Quicken, which I use merely to download my bank records. The upgrade was at full price with no recognition that I was already a customer. The upgrade had several non-intuitive features, which was not helped by an inability to access the online Help. They seemed to imply it was Microsoft’s problem when eventually customer service replied by e-mail after 48 hours and suggested a patch to give access. Life is short and one cannot blog about all egregious examples of poor customer service. .. and Mark Minasi has described well the Nonintuitive Actions from Quicken’s Maker about this Quicken forced upgrade, with many commenters expressing similar frustrations.

Then my bank encouraged me to check out the Intuit Canada QuickTax software for tax returns, with the added advantage of being able to submit returns online.

Perhaps I should have learnt. Leopards rarely change their spots. However the QuickTax offer was enticing. I did twice check with technical support on some questions I had and unfortunately on both occasions was misinformed. Surprisingly I had to call a Montreal number, 514-227-3063, which took some digging to find. From the contacts I made subsequently with this number, I was probably being redirected to India.

As suggested on the website I checked with the Canada Revenue Agency Netfile site to ensure QuickTax was certified and read the following:
*Free offering:
Each QuickTax product must be purchased and can produce a limited number of returns over $25,000. However, you can prepare up to 18 free tax returns for anyone who earns less than $25,000 net individual income per year (line 236 on T1).
This same information can also be found on the Intuit Canada website.

So having done sufficient due diligence, as we thought, we started preparing online returns. Perhaps we should have checked some of those reviews that Intuit Canada featured on the website. Here is what jord of Toronto wrote.

That is not an extreme review since more than 10% of reviewers rated the product even lower. One would have hoped that a company bold enough to call itself Intuit Canada would have produced an intuitive software. Sadly that is not the case. If only I had read what Jonathan Chevreau wrote in the Financial Post on the QuickTax package (neither quick nor painless), I could have avoided all this frustration.

Indeed by reading his article, I could have avoided an additional frustration that Intuit Canada creates. Using the online version of QuickTax, you must pay an additional fee for every tax return created. I believe his account is correct, although it’s somewhat tough to figure it out and technical support in my case gave incorrect information.

The CD versions of Quick-Tax Standard, Platinum or Unincorporated cost $40, $60 and $80, respectively, which permits the preparation of just two returns for gross incomes above $25,000, plus up to 18 Freedom returns for those with gross incomes below the threshold.

Beyond that, you can unlock the ability to process other returns for $10 extra per QuickTax Basic return or $15 extra for the other packages. So, for the 40% of its customers that need to process more than two $25,000-plus returns, it will cost more this year. Single users can pay just $20, $30 or $40, for the three Web applications, but couples will have to pay twice that to process joint Web returns.

Fortunately, you can find cheaper alternatives at Canada Revenue Agency’s NetFiling site (www.netfile.gc.ca). One alternative, UFile.ca, is still available for $16 for the Web version and $30 for the CD.

Intuit Canada may feel they are being reasonable in all this. After all you don’t need to pay if you try the product, find you don’t like it and decide not to use it for your return. Given that you have invested a great deal of time in entering data at that point, that’s a tough decision. In addition they suggest they will probably give you your money back in the very small print.

6. Try QuickTax for 60 days. If you are not 100% satisfied, simply e-mail quicktaxonline@intuit.com within sixty (60) days of purchase to request a full refund of the purchase price. Please provide your order number (see confirmation of purchase screen) and the reason our product did not meet your needs.

If Intuit Canada was at all customer-centric, they would realize what an extremely poor job they’re doing with their QuickTax online software.

Related: QuickTax Disappoints

Today is Earth Day: a day that requires us all to do some thinking. Earth Day certainly grabs attention now to an extent that Gaylord Nelson could hardly have imagined in 1969:

I was satisfied that if we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda. It was a big gamble, but worth a try.

The method for getting the message across has certainly evolved. As Reuters points out, Google has gone green and so have dozens of comic strips while President George W. Bush opted for a traditional tree-planting on Tuesday to mark Earth Day, an environmental event that has become increasingly political and corporate. Google.com’s online search site features a lush logo with letters made of moss-covered boulders, a tree sprouting from the “L” and a waterfall flowing beneath it.

A great many people are getting involved. For example, Earth Day Canada is a national environmental communications organization mandated to improve the state of the environment by empowering Canadians to achieve local solutions. However the Rockford Register Star of Rockford, IL raises a provocative question,

Wouldn�t Gaylord Nelson be proud of all the fuss made about Earth Day?
Not really. Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, never meant for today to be the Hallmark holiday of the environmental movement. He never meant for Wal-Mart to adopt the slogan �Earth-friendly. Budget-friendly.�

Even tougher issues come up when you remember that it’s not just your corner of the Earth. We’ve really got to try to find solutions that work for all of Earth’s inhabitants. The production of biofuels, often suggested for a green planet, illustrates the difficulties. The Gazette suggests it’s time to scrap the ethanol boondoggle.

Government-funded conversion to “biofuels” such as ethanol is scarcely helping with energy efficiency and is exacerbating a global food crisis. It’s time for Canada to reverse course on this failed approach.

The pendulum is swinging strongly in the other direction. Last fall Jean Ziegler, the UN’s “special rapporteur on the right to food,” claimed it was a “crime against humanity” to divert corn from food to fuel. That claim resonates more loudly this spring, because of fast-rising grain prices - and resulting unrest - around the world. The enormous investment in biofuels in the U.S., the European Union, Canada and elsewhere is fuelling a food crisis in poor countries.

The Telegraph highlights Food shortages and asks how will we feed the world?

A global food shortage threatens the lives of millions. Steep rises in the price of staples such as wheat and rice are having an even bigger impact on poor countries.

Venezuela’s oil minister might be accused of bias in proclaiming in Rome that Using Food to Make Fuel Is `Criminal’. However he may well be right.

“Look at the effect it has, the craziness,” Rafael Ramirez told reporters today in the Italian capital, where he is attending the three-day International Energy Forum. “All countries, and particularly in Latin America, have problems with food stuffs. It is such a bad idea to use foodstuffs for fuel, it is criminal.”

As each of us does our bit for Earth Day today, we should not forget all our neighbors in this global village.