August 1, 2005
What Ethiopia's bloggers are talking about
A few months ago, a fellow Ethiopian blogger got in touch to suggest that we should start some sort of website to keep track of the country's growing blogging community. The idea was to launch an Ethiopian version of Blog Africa - a place where you could go to see a list of all the latest blogs about Ethiopia, information about the bloggers and perhaps a selection of their latest entries.
From time to time I've thought of various ways we could do this - merging RSS feeds, manually updating a catalogue etc etc (While I was sitting around wondering, someone did actually launch an aggregated Ethiopian blog - http://planet.tezeta.org/)
Then, over the weekend, I came across this web service called TagCloud. Basically it scans a number of websites, pulls out the most popular words - makes the really popular words multi-coloured and even bigger - and then prints them out. It is not what we were thinking about all those months ago. But it is one way of keeping track of what Ethiopian bloggers are talking about.
Here is the TagCloud for a selection of the Ethioblogs I've got listed in the right hand column, including Meskel Square:
And here is the TagCloud for Meskel Square on its own:
Not surprisingly, we all use the words and phrases 'ethiopia', 'addis ababa', 'africa', 'ferengi' and 'Meles Zenawi' a lot. Unfortunately 'unfortunately' also seems to be a popular word. Phrases that Ethiopia's bloggers are using that I am apparently not using include 'AK47, 'death' and 'diplomats' - except that now I have just listed those words in this entry they will probably appear in my cloud. In fact, now that I have included the general Ethiopian blog TagCloud words in one of my entries, their TagCloud words will eventually become my TagCloud words. All very confusing.
If you click on any of the words, you get a listing of the sites that used them. These TagClouds are based on live feeds so check back over time to see how the Ethiopian blog conversation is changing.
Posted by aheavens at August 1, 2005 4:54 AM