AOL's content has gotten very cloudy over the past year. And I'm not talking about the outlook of our pundits. I'm talking about the increased usage of "clouds" to represent data on our content pages. Commonly referred to as 'tag clouds', they are the data pattern that allows for data to be viewed in different ways, typically by order and magnitude. Wikipedia has a more detailed explanation of the pattern in case you care.

Unfortunately our implementations lack consistency in the way that we convey both order and magnitude, sometimes resulting in hard to comprehend displays and inefficient reuse of implementations. Let's take a look at some real examples to convey the absence of best practices in our designs and then we can talk about the three design principles needed in any cloud.

Just noticed that Yahoo was now hosting the NY Times crossword puzzle on their games site. The cool thing about it is that the crossword is interactive and each clue promotes the ability to "Search for Hint" using Yahoo Search (at the bottom of the screenshot). What a brilliant way to (a) help dumb people like me complete the crossword and (b) increase usage of their search product, creating more awareness as well as more search revenue. Brilliant.

Last month when I heard that Google Maps added coverage for 54 new countries and that one of those countries was Iraq I had an idea. Wouldn't it be interesting to put together a map mashup of casualties from the Iraq war/conflict/whatever. I know what you're thinking. What's cool about plotting deaths. Absolutely nothing. The intent is purely to visually demonstrate how much bad stuff has come out of that war/conflict/whatever and to represent how many lives it has claimed. Once a quarter the Washington Post takes a few pages in it's main section to show photos of each of the US soldiers who has lost in the life over there, and although I am far from politically involved that day's paper brings out a whole lot of emotion. And that's just a simple photo and a blurb about where and how they died. Nothing about the impact of their passing on those who knew them. Whenever I see those photos I always think how perishable the tribute is - the soldier dies and they get a photo in a page of the Post sometime at the end of that quarter. Wouldn't it be more honorable to let those soldiers be honored in a more permanent way, and in a way that brings more attention to the insanity and scale at which the casualties are occurring. And then you could apply some of the Web 2.0 conventions to allow folks to post their tributes to those fallen heroes. So once I saw that Google Maps was covering Iraq I figured it had to be easy to implement such a site.

Recently I went looking for such an implementation and although I didn't find exactly what I was looking for I did find something of similar impact. The URL is http://www.obleek.com/iraq/index.html and it appears to be someone's personal project. The site uses Flash to generate a map of the country along with a time delayed plot of all of the casualties suffered over there, by US troops as well as all other countries represented in the "coalition". The use of Flash creates an experience that would not be attainable by using typical Google Maps mashup code. I highly recommend checking it out. Not only does it do a great job of presenting the data in a visual way, it leaves quite an impact as to the scale of the casualties. And to think that is does not even include data since February 2007.

Google has released "Google Shared Stuff", a foray into social sharing as well as a front door into other 3rd party sites for sharing and bookmarking.

The invocation of the experience is either of two ways. Sites can add a "Share" button to their web pages but who other than Google properties would do this? (Ha! Someone probably said the same thing about "Add to My Yahoo" when that was first offered. Fools!) As a consumer you can visit the Google Shared Stuff site and drag their bookmarklet onto your Bookmarks Toolbar and voila, you're ready to share.

Once you instigate the Share experience you get a popup experience with the following screenshots. The thing that I like about this is that they factored out all of the particulars nuances and left the user invocation as a simple "Share". It's only after the user made that commitment that they are left with the choices of Share, E-Mail, other and so on. And the form factor of the left-column navigation allows them to expand on that list by adding things like IM, SMS, gPhone!, or maybe even a high level promotion to something like delicious instead of burying it under "Other". Heck, they likely could offer select partners the ability to customize that menu by passing along a client-code in the popup code for the Share button, allowing the popup to promote our interests when Share is invoked from a page with the properly coded invocation.











So they do some neat things within this functionality. One item is that they offer the user the ability to send a screen shot of the shared site in lieu of just the link to it. That's pretty neat, and obviously opens the door to some serious parental controls like issues. The other neat thing is the invitation to tag shared items. This is great for Google to gain really good insight as to relevance and context for the URLs being shared. More fodder for them to alter/influence search engine results off of. (i.e. be sure to Share your content!)

The outcome of the first slide is a personal sharing page on Google's site. The 'social' part of this comes into play in that I can see what has been shared by those people that I know, meaning those folks in my Gmail contact list.

And yeah, did I mention that fact that Google uses the screen real estate to tell you that the page has been viewed X times and shared Y times. They are telling you the results before you even finish the task. Although how do they know how many times the page has been viewed, and really, viewed by who/what/when?

Another thing that I really liked, and found particularly "Google", was the way that they labeled the header of the page. It wasn't "Public View" and "Private View" but rather "Page As I see it" and "Page as everyone sees it". Very direct.




Now if we can only figure out how to get our social share site (Netscape --> Wow --> Propellor) added to that list. But then again, should we expect folks to add our site knowing that it's likely to change names again soon anyway?