This is the text of James Joyce’s Dubliners, which is one of my favourite texts (snagged from Project Gutenberg). It’s also my go-to for when I’m playing with text analysis tools (when am I playing with text analysis tools, you ask? There’s a post in the works on that very topic, stay tuned). Looking at this cloud makes me want to run home, brew up a pot of tea, settle into a comfy chair on the deck, and lose myself in these stories once again (as I’ve done roughly 12-ish times in the past).

In the spirit of meme-ifying this (thanks, Jason!), I’m tagging some work peeps: Shawn, Nick, John, Krista, and Karen.

Sorry to be so screenshot-y lately, but I couldn’t pass this one up. The above image is a tag cloud of my del.icio.us bookmarks generated by wordle. You should have heard the loud gasp that issued from my lips upon seeing this image. Why? Because IT IS MY LIFE represented in a tag cloud. Well, my life at the moment, at any rate. Here’s the what’s what on that:

• I’ve read that “to read” (or some variation thereof) is arguably everyone’s most frequently applied tag. As you can see from the image above, it’s definitely mine, and it always has been. This is particularly poignant at this very moment in my life because it feels like I’m not doing much more than wading in a pool of good intentions, gathering data and content that could potentially have some impact on me if only I had time to digest it all. You see, I’m one of those odd types that actually removes the “toread” tag once I’ve read something, so the fact that it is, by far, my most frequently applied tag drives home the point that I’m not reading enough. At the rate I’m going, I might never get through the “toread” backlog and that makes me disproportionately unhappy.
• Of course, one of the main reasons why I’m not getting to all that juicy, bookmarked content is because I’m teaching my LIS course again this term (“lis9763“). It’s the first time I’ve taught it during back-to-back terms and I’m starting to wonder if that was a good idea. In some ways it works well: I got into a groove balancing it all last term, and that’s continued nicely into this term. On the other hand, it’s a lot of work and requires me to drop a few other things from my plate (to wit “toread”; see also: dust bunnies running amok in my house). At any rate, the relative weighting of “lis9763″ in my tag cloud is spot-on.
• And then there’s that little project that is swallowing me whole at work: our website redesign (“redesign“). I’m in the thick of it at the moment, and when you’re in the thick of something so huge, with a deadline that looms (September!), you have to keep reminding yourself how much (a lot) and for how long (years) you’ve wanted to blow up the website and start over.  I can’t tell you how exciting it is to finally be doing the work (this is my favourite project ever), but boy howdy, it is all-consuming. Even more so than its relative size indicates in my tag cloud. “toread” will necessarily remain on hold for a few more months.

So, there it is, my life distilled into three tags. I am at once horrified (I’ve GOT to get our more), vindicated (so THAT’s where all my time is going!), and amused (O, tags! you never fail me!) by it.

Of course, once I started noodling around my category archives, I started thinking about how I really should be doing some tagging around here, so off I went in search of a tag plugin and found & installed Ultimate Tag Warrior. And now I am resisting the urge to spend the rest of the day adding tags to all the archived posts. If I didn’t have this enticing book at my elbow, I’d probably do it.

Later: shame that the upgrade to WP 2.0.1 changes your feed URL entirely. I’ve set up the redirect and I’m monitoring Bloglines to make sure all goes well. And, look! A tag cloud! I installed the runPHP plugin to make the magic happen.

Right. Now, back to that book.

Later still: it looks like the RSS feed is redirecting as it should. Good. You don’t have to update your subscription, but FYI, the new feed is at http://www.blogwithoutalibrary.net/?feed=rss2.