Brand Tags

Gene Smith blogged recently about a tagging game http://www.brandtags.net/. It’s been around since about May. It’s not really a game there’s not a lot to it, tag a brand with the first thing that comes to mind and then see what other people think about it. Not so surprisingly the resulting tag cloud shows I think the same as the majority most of the time. What I like about the tag cloud is that the tag size is weighted completely by frequency so the higher ranking tags are absolutely massive and it works, for this site, you only want to know at the end of the day what the majority think. The usability could be better as I want to see the tag cloud of the brand I have just tagged before I go on to tag another brand, or I’d like to be given a list of the brands I’ve tagged so far so I can go and click back and see other peoples opinions later on. But it’s a work in progress as the creator Noah Briar states on his blog.

The most interesting thing about this is the most useful thing about it, looking at peoples opinions of different brands, there’s some companies who I think would rather they hadn’t looked. In all it’s a very cheap focus group.

Its sister site http://celebtags.com/index.php which just doesn’t have enough celebrities on to be mean about, is entertaining for about a second just to see the most insults one person can collect.

All a bit too American, understandably, but it would be nice to see a few more British brands in there. There’s some obvious British insults in the celeb tag data so there’s proof we’re looking at it.

In all well worth spending a few minutes on when you’re meant to be doing something more productive.

Embracing Procrastination

I’m trying a new form of procrastination, something i don’t do all that often, blog posting.  Instead of randomly wasting time looking at websites mildly related to what i’m working on, checking my rss feeds for the tenth time, seeing if anyones done anything interesting on facebook, checking my email, making my fifth cup of tea, looked at solutions to being distracted and avoiding procrastination – once i ventured on to myspace i knew i was getting desperate.

I am really pushed for time, my PhD presentation has to be written by tonight i need all the time i can to plan what i’m going to say and talk through it, but instead of being focussed and breaking down what’s left to do, i’m writing a blog.

This is the reason i refuse to use twitter, i’d spend more of my day updating it with mundane facts about myself and my day that nobody cares about than doing any work.  Web 2.0, what is it good for except giving people excuses not to work.  Brilliant if you, like me are researching it, then any web 2.0 esq procrastination is actually work related -fantastic.

But i won’t be doing it for much longer if i don’t get back to presentation writing – arrghhhh!!!