Saturday, 13 October 2007

Jiglu toodle-oo

The Jiglu widget sure wuz purty, but it had to go.

Jiglu claims to tag your blog posts for you, by combing through them and tagging things like people, places, events etc.

In the first place, it does a pisspoor job. This blog has 530-odd posts, and Jiglu came back with about 60 tags. Ludicrous. In the sidebar there you'll see my own tag cloud which has far more, and those are only tags that I've used twice or more. And I'm often very lazy about tagging. Jiglu's widget had me down for a total of two events and eight people. I think we've covered more than that.

Jiglu's results routinely include all names mentioned, which is not always helpful. Worse, it picked up on any and every TLA, producing tags like WTF, ETA (edited to add) and PS, none of which are at all useful as tags.

But the cardinal sin, and the reason I scrapped it as soon as I noticed, is that it decided unilaterally to go in and highlight all the words which had been designated as tags, thus forcing an unwanted and really pretty stupid design element on me. If I've mentioned John Gielgud, say, you don't need to have those words highlighted for you in the post where John Gielgud is mentioned. You need to have a place where you can find tags and then trace the posts they come from.

So that's why Jiglu is gone. I'm not only a blingnut. I also demand performance from my bling.