Like Brian Morrissey at AdFreak, I’m not a big fan of tag clouds (or “weighted lists”, to use a description from my visual-design past). Whatever their utility as navigation tools, they’re usually ugly as sin, especially when applied to a blog/site that devotes 90 percent of its content to one or two topics (obviating the need for this sort of filtering in the first place).

But take away the navigation aspect, and apply the size-weighting of fonts to mindshare concepts, and you’ve got something. Specifically, you’ve got Brand Tags, an experiment of name-brand products and services with word-association.

Above is a sampling for Tropicana, with a pretty typical lineup related to juice products. Not all brands fare as well or predictably, though: American Airlines ominously tags high for 9/11, while Jagermeister embarrassingly (for a liquor product) registers a strong false-postive as a beer product.

It’s intriguing, although I’m not sure how much faith you can put into an anonymous and limited sampling. Definitely worth a gander, though.

While CBS will be getting a robust and sprawling Web media operation in its $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET Networks, in my mind there are two chief reasons for the deal:

- News.com

- TV.com

It just about begins and ends there. Both those sites — or, more properly, their browser addresses — make synergistic sense under CBS’ umbrella. Everything else — the long-established audiences, the physical Silicon Valley hub — is incidental, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see chunks of CNET eventually get jettisoned by the new corporate parent.

CNET has occupied that valuable news.com URL real estate for more than a decade. I always thought it was peculiar that such a fundamental brand/concept should take you to a narrow slice of news, instead of a more-general news portal; but that’s CNET’s reward for cornering that domain so early. Having news.com resolve to CBS News would confer an almost default status to the network for online news consumption, simply by virtue of the easily-input Web address.

Meanwhile, the TV.com domain came under CNET’s control more recently. Just nurturing its existing community-building formula will pay off for the short term; further out, it could be used to cement CBS’ position in televised media even further.

Yes, I’m characterizing this deal as essentially another dollars-for-domains transaction. Unlike other instances, though, this one actually makes sense. There’s no other way to establish the kind of mindshare that two dead-simple dot-com addresses bring. Having these two roads lead to CBS online properties will count big, with overall brand-building and online revenue generation via ads and other channels.

Speaking of Tom Sachs, he’s a multi-media kinda pop-cultural artist, as evidenced by his collection of short films.

They look to be mostly stop-motion animation pieces with funky soundtracks/voiceovers attached. Sachs collaborated with the Neistat Brothers on these, and the influence definitely shows.

My favorites from this group are: “McDonald’s Teaser”, musically accompanied by the late Wesley Willis’ “Rock and Roll McDonald’s”; and “Bitches and Money”, a 1/25th-scale tour through a ghetto, backed appropriately by NWA’s “Gangsta Gangsta”.

Funny thing. It was a miserably rainy day the last time I was inspired to post an iPod Random 8 list, and so it is again today. Must be a trend.

Anyway, here’s the latest shuffle-determined string of output from my iPod Touch (or “iTouch”, if you prefer). Length of said string synced to 8trk, which I’m told is progressing nicely.

1. “Let Me Think About It (club mix)”, Ida Corr vs. Fedde Le Grand - That I am the true way towards ecstasy.

2. “F-cking Boyfriend (Peaches Remix)”, The Bird And The Bee - When you lay down with me, you never slept that night.

3. “Mysterious Ways”, Angelique Kidjo - She sees the man inside the child.

4. “Mer du Japon (Remix by Kris Menace)”, AIR - J’en perds la raison (I lost my mind).

5. “Relaxation Spa Treatment”, Dan the Automator - [instrumental, no lyrics]

6. “Good Love”, Isaac Hayes (as Chef from “South Park”) - You’ll recommend me to your mother, your sisters, your aunts and your nieces.

7. “Let’s Stay Together”, Al Green - Loving you whether, whether.

8. “Colours”, Donovan - Freedom is a word I rarely use.

The latest and greatest addicting online timewaster from the Flash gamemasters at Pixeljam: Dino Run (probably have more luck loading the game from the mirror site):

A giant asteroid has crash landed and extinction may just be inevitable. You are a Velociraptor — and you should probably start running for your life! Run, jump, catch a ride with a Pterodactyl, eat power-up plants & other things, save all the dino eggs you can!

Jump into the multiplayer and test your speed against your fellow dinos as you race for glory — and to avoid extinction!

It’s dead simple as far as gameplay: Just keep your finger pressed down on the right-arrow key at all costs. Unless you want to experience the Big Black Wall of Doom coming from the left. Which, actually, you should do, just once — it’s as fearsome as a retro-pixelated disaster scene gets.

It was cruel, but admittedly novel as far as Web vandalism goes: The forums section of the Epilepsy Foundation of America was hacked recently, with hundreds of seizure-inducing blink-animated images, and links to such images, being planted on the forum pages.

This reminds me: I’m thinking that MySpace, in general, would be off-limits to epileptics. Considering that design atrocities like this (adjust volume accordingly before clicking) are allowed to roam freely in that online garden.

Xobni (pronunciation above) is a software startup that makes Microsoft Outlook into something closer to user-friendly.

But, since I haven’t used a local email client of any kind in years, I don’t care too much about all that. What I do care about:

“Xobni” is “inbox” spelled backwards. Not all that original, but creative nonetheless.

Take Conan O’Brien’s recurring “If They Mated” skit and make it frighteningly real, and you’ve got The Human Hybrid.

“Human” is a bit of stretch, only in that it suggests an egalitarian photographic genepool. In reality, this is all about interpreting reg’lar folks’ images as a melding of two well-known celebrities. Nothing wrong with that — it works for late-night television! — but it’s something of an old-hat trick.

I assume most of the photo submissions, like the one pictured here for “Clay Cruise/Tom Aiken”, are authentic. (I love that hybridization-slash-slashing of the names, by the way.) Some of them, though, I’m just not buying.

Gee, what a surprise. It looks like R.H. Donnelly’s $350-million purchase of Business.com last year has run aground, as both the company’s value and the acquisition’s accompanying talent have evaporated.

In the past year, its shares have plunged 95% on worries about the company’s hefty debt-load, a softening economy, and investor worry about whether the door-stopping printed directories it has gobbled up are going the way of the drive-in movie theater or the eight-track player (a familiar refrain these days).

But we’re not here to praise or bury the phone book. Rather, what caught my eye was the recent departure of Jake Winebaum as the head of Donnelly’s Internet efforts that are aimed at preventing precisely those worries from coming to pass.

Last summer, Winebaum and his backers sold Business.com, a company they founded at the height of the dot.com boom, to Donnelly for the handsome sum of $345 million in cash. As part of that deal, Winebaum agreed to take on the role as Donnelly’s chief Internet guru. At that time, in August, Donnelly was worth more than $3 billion. Today, the whole company’s market cap is worth less than what it paid for Business.com - $338 million at Thursday’s close of $4.91. Ouch.

Fortune editor Richard Siklos wonders if he’s the only one who’s got an irrational fascination with the kind of heat that Business.com attracts. It’s true, the main attraction is the dollar figures that have been attached to it: First $7.5 million a decade ago for nothing but the URL, and then this 9-figure sum for… Well, still not much more than the URL. It’s a rare scam that ever pays off so handsomely, so consistently.

I can’t wait to see what the next purchase price for this domain name will be, probably only a couple of years from now. Will the next headline trumpet a “Billion-Dollar Business.com”? If that’s too rich for your blood, then you can opt to do “bidness” for a relative bargain instead.

Sezmi is an upstart pay-TV service that’s pitching itself as something close to a one-stop video-entertainment hub for the household:

Sezmi’s system takes some explaining. At its heart is a TV set-top box that receives video content in three different ways. Two are available through other means: digital over-the-air local broadcasts, the kind that are available to anyone with a digital TV and a rabbit-ear antenna; and Internet downloads through the home’s broadband connection.

The third delivery method would be unique to Sezmi. It plans to have local TV stations use vacant portions of their airwaves to transmit basic cable channels like Nickelodeon and Discovery. Given the limited spectrum available, the stations won’t be able to transmit a full lineup, and only some of it will be in high definition. Sezmi plans to mitigate that by having stations send out the most-watched shows and have the set-top boxes save them on their hard drives, making them available for viewing on demand.

Some noise is being made about this three-pronged delivery system being overly complex. My sense is that it doesn’t matter how complicated it is, as long as it works. Consumers aren’t going to care how it all comes together; all that’ll count is that it pipes in the content that people want, and at a competitive price.

The company is on the right track in branding itself as “TV 2.0″, as that conveys an expansion of standard cable or satellite. It should take that messaging one step further with a simple value proposition that goes something like: “Local, cable, and VOD — plus YouTube. All on one screen. Sezmi.”

In a sense, Sezmi would be a TV provider that’s media-agnostic. You wouldn’t have to switch from one screen (television) to another (computer monitor) to consume all manner of video content — you’d access it all from your remote control. That’s crucial in achieving the long-anticipated melding of television and Web:

In general, Sezmi’s attitude toward Web content is to integrate it seamlessly into the overall universe. Individual repositories or “zones” of Web video, such as YouTube, can create their own XML Sezmi page. In a demonstration of the technology, a local news page was organized in a basic layout of weather, news, traffic, and featured stories, with a video box in the lower right-hand corner and additional data to the top right.

Of course, the tricky part will be getting the infrastructure and carriage in place. Sezmi is building limited content agreements and presenting itself as an ideal partner for regional ISPs and telecom providers, but it’s got to have a presentable channel/content lineup to offer up. And even then, it won’t be easy:

The company faces a lot of competition. Apple TV is going to be more attractive now that it can get movies on the same day as they go on sale as DVDs. Vudu also has a lot of movies on demand available. Tivo’s Series 3 box can appeal to high-definition video junkies. AT&T is rolling out its DSL-based IPTV service nationwide, promising interactivity and movies on demand. And Digeo will have its Moxi boxes out later this year as well. It’s a crowded market and Sezmi will need big partners or a big advertising budget to overcome all the noise.

In the face of this, Sezmi has all the signs of being a short-lived attempt at next-stage television. It could be fun to watch anyway, especially as elements of its approach influence the rest of the industry.

The above picture of the L Line Bedford Avenue platform harp-playing performance artist is re-presented here as an anonymous favor to an anonymous poster on Subway Crush:

Some weekends I see you playing a giant ass harp at the Bedford stop and I think to myself “holy shit that is a huge harp!” A girl with that dedication is someone I need to get to know. I never wanted to interrupt your playing, but would love to grab some coffee or a drink sometime. I’ll even help you carry your harp! Get in touch!

Looks like she’s managed to strum somebody’s heartstrings. If this helps you get her digits, brother, then you’re welcome.

I was at that Bedford stop just this past Friday — a rare personal excursion into Brooklyn. Ms. Harp was nowhere to be seen; I guess she’s got a weekends-only engagement.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a PR-blast email offering up an interview opportunity with the CEO of SocialMedia Networks. Just another Web advertising middleman, but with a twist: It’s exclusively targeting the Facebooks and MySpaces of the online world.

I didn’t take the bait, partly because I knew someone else would.

Ads on social network sites aren’t new, although far-reaching monetization attempts have met resistance. Marketers follow the eyeballs, and when more and more people spend more and more Web time on these dedicated sites, that’s where the money will go.

But how effective will these ad pitches be? Operating on the premise that a website is just another website might not work in these settings, because something like MySpace is tacitly considered a no-sell zone. That doesn’t mean it won’t yield responses, but those will probably be accompanied by higher-than-normal instances of backlash.

In a sense, blogging marketer Paul Chaney probably best characterizes this approach thusly:

Advertising on social media sites like Facebook, Bebo and others is akin to going to a restaurant and asking for a seat at someone else’s table. Maybe they’ll be receptive and maybe they won’t. Conversely, to create your own branded socnet is to invite others to have a seat at your table.

It’s all context. That’s why I always felt that all those commercial presences via MySpace/Facebook pages — promoting movies, consumer products and even rock bands — are odd fits. If a social network’s purpose is to foster person-to-person connections, how is someone supposed to credibly claim a “relationship” with a marketing piece?

Conversely, I don’t agree with the call for advertisers to create their own dedicated, branded site just for a MySpace-like experience — that’s a lot of heavy lifting for a campaign which might or might not have a short shelf-life. I guess that opens up an opportunity for a third party to offer up a middle-ground solution: Cookie-cutter social-network setups that can be developed for single-purpose messaging campaigns and that can be ramped up quickly.

While rushing through the Upper East Side today, a sign in an electronics store display caught my eye:

DIGITAL CAMERAS
YOUTUBE-ENABLED

I half-suspected that this was a snake-oil claim. But in fact, Casio’s Exilim camera line touts its YouTube-branded point-click-upload onboard software interface, which is designed to make recording and posting of videos seamless. Furthermore, Casio got an exclusive on this YouTube-by-association feature.

Of course, this ain’t news, as Casio rolled out the Exilim almost a year ago.

But it’s news to me. And I think it’s indicative of the times that a camera’s ability to play nice with YouTube is such a powerful sales hook that it’s front-and-center in valuable window display territory. In fact, I’m thinking this is a crucial feature for selling to younger consumers, how might otherwise need convincing to get a dedicated camera versus just using their cameraphone.

Demographically speaking, that is. Research polling firm Harris Interactive finds that homosexuals are a more receptive blog-reading audience than heteros, 51 percent versus 36 percent.

That includes both content and acceptance of blog advertising — meaning cha-ching for all those gay-themed AdSense ad units just waiting to render!

Despite this news, I kinda doubt too many gay surfers are visiting this blog all that frequently.

…At least, that’s how Wil Wheaton sees it as he expresses much love for everyone’s favorite microblogging platform.

I always appreciate gratuitous “Bust A Move” references, but I question the invocation of the “spam-spam-spam” skit, as that invites unfavorable connotations for any Internet-based communications/feedback system.

As for me, I wouldn’t call myself a Twitter hater, but at the same time, I don’t feel the need to jump aboard. Aside from the value of what I’d put into and get out of it, I don’t know that it’s any more innovative than any other later-stage social-networkish Web app. Besides, enough of my time is occupied with the macroblogging shown here.

A pretty clear tipping point in communications and media growth is an industry shift from time/unit-rate to flat-rate billing. The growth of the Web, for instance, really exploded once America Online, the dominant ISP of the mid-1990s, phased out per-minute dialup access plans in favor of an unlimited monthly flat-rate subscription fee (the model most of us still have for today’s broadband connections). The lifting of the built-in restrictions that a la carte pricing forces creates a more ubiquitous all-access service, one that users more tightly weave into their everyday lives.

It’s taken a while, but that offering concept is finally creeping into the wireless phone industry with unlimited talk and data plans, playing off consumer tendencies:

“Consumers avoid these services because they want to know how much they’ll pay at the end of each month,” says Jeff Kagan, a Marietta, Ga.-based telecom analyst. “No longer fearing extra costs, of any kind, is going to drive real change in the marketplace.”

That’s something that’s proved often: Price predictability. Consumers won’t necessarily balk at a set monthly charge, even if it’s inflated. But a variable charge causes anxiety, even if it’s affordable — it’s irrational, but a line item that “flashes” on the monthly household bills scares people away. Removing that factor also removes a psychological barrier, leading to unfettered usage.

It’s still a work in progress. For me, an unlimited plan doesn’t make much sense, as I never get even remotely close to my base-package of monthly minutes right now. I would counterbalance that with extremely heavy data use, mainly plain old Web access; but doing so on the existing handset interfaces doesn’t appeal to me. There’s always the iPhone option, but probably not for another couple of years.

What’s the longer-term prospects of this industry shift? Will players like Blackberry become superfluous when everyone’s personal communications hub meets all accessing needs? Will everyone obsessively check their email, MySpace/Facebook pages, etc. on the go? Would this lead to a more-rapid phasing out of all wired Web setups (at least in residential settings)? For now, price predictability means usage unpredictability.

Who knew that a slightly-creepy cat humor site did enough business to need an office staff? But it’s true: “I Can Has Cheezburger” is hiring, and is getting more of a challenge than anticipated in the screening process.

Apparently, looking at Lolcats all day is an appealing job. Ben Huh, founder of the site and chief executive of Seattle-based Pet Holdings Inc., has received 250 applications since the job was posted on Monday under the headline “Kittehs Want Moar Workerhumans.”

“I got a stack of resumes that I can’t even go through,” Huh said. “You know how they say, ‘Spell everything correctly because the people reading your resume will toss it out otherwise?’ Well, we can’t even do that. We won’t knock you out for spelling…. The traditional resume screening methods don’t apply here.”

The winning applicant will join three other people who moderate ICHC and a few related Pet Holdings sites (think dogs with funny captions). A big part of the job will be selecting from the 7,000 submissions the company receives every day of captioned photos, plus 2,000 uncaptioned ones.

I really hope they have some sort of sensory-overload specialist on-hand, to guard against surefire burnout. Really, how many bizarro photos can someone sift through before their mind rebels in protest?

I’ve got no plans to relocate to the Emerald City, so regrettably, I’ll have to decline this (questionable) opportunity. However, just to show I can flow with the cryptic content, I offer up my previous two posts on the LOLcat phenomenon. Specifically the post titles:

- IN UR FACE, DOMOKUN KITTEH

- ON UR DETHBED, FEELIN U DIE

Actually, in a way, this fractured diction might need more stringent editing than you’d expect. Right up my alley, skills-wise.

Weardrobe is an online, largely phototag-driven clothing-catalogue community, designed to create a huge virtual fashion closet via the aggregation of millions of users’ wardrobe choices.

Not really my kind of thing.

But I found out about it by peeking at the guest list for tomorrow’s Jelly coworking session in Brooklyn, which I’m attending. Weardrobe founder Suzanne Xie will also be there, and so I’d love to pitch the following add-on to her site:

Weirdrobe. Like, weird items of clothing, or donned combinations of such, that elicit puzzlement and awe from onlookers. Or something like that.

Hey, I’m a sucker for puns. Weardrobe got the ball rolling, so I’ll give it another push.

So if inveterate Wikipedia contributors want to add/edit entries in a printed-book version of the encyclopedia-like resource — which publisher Bertelsmann plans to produce, drawing from the German edition of the website — will they have to stock up on Wite-Out and scissors?

The media company — whose units include publisher Random House Inc. and music venture Sony BMG — said Wednesday that it plans to publish “The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia” starting in September with the content made up of 50,000 of the most-searched terms on the German language edition of Wikipedia.

Beate Varnhorn, the head of publishing at Bertelsmann Encyclopedia Institute said the “condensed, one-volume print edition” would bring Wikipedia to a new audience.

She told The Associated Press that the sheer number of entries on the German Wikipedia — at last count they numbered approximately 740,000 and would likely fill hundreds of printed volumes — meant publishing all of it was not “a good project for the German book trade.”

But an annual collection of the most-sought out terms made sense, she said. “A yearbook really can be a documentation of the zeitgeist.”

I can see this move as widening the audience scope of Wikipedia, but in a decidedly dumbed-down way — it reduces the site to a top-ten list. Naturally the flavor-of-the-month entries will get the most action, and by extension would spur the bulk of sales for any published product.

Speaking of those sales:

Like its Web-based namesake, the book will be under a free license, meaning its content can be distributed and copied, including commercially. Copies of the 992-page book — available only in German — will retail for $31.80.

Bertelsmann has agreed to pay Wikimedia Deutschland eV, which promotes the German-language version of the online encyclopedia, $1.59 a copy, said Arne Klempert, the group’s executive director.

“To some extent it’s marketing for Bertelsmann. They are using free content, free knowledge,” he told The Associated Press. “Legally, they don’t have to pay anything for the content but they don’t want to give the impression that they are acting on the back of the Wikipedia authors, so they decided to give something back for that reason.”

Despite the stated ground rules under the free documentation license, I’m sure this exercise in crass commercialism will raise hackles among those with nothing better to do. Likewise, how many article-writers are going to feel miffed over their words generating profit for someone else — again, even though that’s part of the deal? Most Wikipedians blanch at any moves toward directly monetizing the site’s content; even couching a print product as an attempt to spread the word will be met with hostility.

Despite the creeping acceptance in venues high and low — including among far too many media professionals who should know better — I still regard the use of Wikipedia as a reference source to the equivalent of citing graffiti. Bottom line, if a page can be altered at any given moment, it’s not worthy of trust. I’m afraid an enshrined, faux-legitimized hard-copy version will only accelerate the false sense of security it engenders.

Wouldn’t it be nice to shoot your physician an email when you have a non-critical medical concern, instead of sacrificing the better part of a day with phonetag or an office visit? Good luck getting a response to such an inquiry: Only about a third of U.S. doctors say they respond to patients’ emails, with the rest offering up basically an “I-don’t-wanna” excuse.

Doctors have their reasons for not hitting the reply button more often. Some worry it will increase their workload, and most physicians don’t get reimbursed for it by insurance companies. Others fear hackers could compromise patient privacy — even though doctors who do e-mail generally do it through password-protected Web sites…

Dr. Daniel Z. Sands, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School, is among the early adopters who doesn’t get paid for e-visits. He sees communicating with patients online as no different from phoning them, a practice that also is not billable.

How hard would it be for physician offices and hospitals to set up an auto-response message that delivers the usual disclaimers, e.g. disavowing email communication for time-sensitive and critical conditions and such? It’s not brain surgery — presumably one of the conditions that these docs wouldn’t want to diagnose via their Outlook inbox…

When phishing attempts wind up in C-level inboxes, a new scale of Web-trawling terminology is necessary:

The tactic of aiming at the rich and powerful with an online scam is referred to by computer security experts as whaling. The term is a play on phishing, an approach that usually involves tricking e-mail users — in this case the big fish — into divulging personal information like credit card numbers. Phishing attacks that are directed at a particular person, rather than blasted out to millions, are also known as spear phishing.

Ahoy, thar they blow! As always, these easily-duped CEOs need to check the URL string in the status bar — ahem, “periscope” — to avoid this Internet-borne scurvy.