On the radar

OCLC is playing with tag clouds. WorldCat Identities produces pages for personal and corporate names. The first 100 are pretty cool, but I can't imagine dealing with a tagcloud of the 18 million names in WorldCat!

http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/

This may be a perpetual Beta, too. I was amused to search for Cornelius Ryan and check the related names. Related by datamining, perhaps, but not by bibliography - John Wayne may have appeared in a movie based on a book by Ryan, but that's the closest they may have ever come. But maybe not, maybe there's something hidden there - but hidden is what we're trying to get away from, isn't it?

Not that it's all bad - the timeline is useful, having the "by" and "about" on the same site is great, and genres can be VERY useful (see Asimov). And finding fictional characters, well, that goes without saying.

This will be great for public and schools librarians, but I bet it gets used even more by undergrads. This was a frequent request for Eng102 when I worked in a community college, and at the U, undergrads usually tried to "find it themselves".

Disintermediation works, too.