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Last night I was doing a little fun reading (yes people, I actually think this stuff is fun...) in Satnam Alag's book, "Collective Intelligence in Action". Before I get to the surreal part of the story, I want to take a little trip in the WABAC machine. A couple years ago, back sometime near the cretaceous period (early Web 2.0), I was utterly obsessed with social networking technology. In particular, I was obsessed with finding the perfect algorithm to build a Tag Cloud. In case you've been under an Internet rock for the last couple of years, a Tag Cloud is essentially nothing more than an alphabetically sorted, weighted list of keywords where the weight of the keyword dictates its relative font size.
Anyway, the result of my obsession with building the perfect tag cloud was a whitepaper that I published entitled, "In search of... the Perfect Tag Cloud. " In this whitepaper I talked about all of the different ways that I'd researched to generate tag clouds, up to and including k-means clustering.
I wrote this Whitepaper in August of 2006 (like I said... early cretaceous). Back to the present... I'm reading Satnam Alag's new book entitled, "Collective Intelligence in Action". I like this one better than the Python-based CI book because it has more of the practical explanation of the math involved and less focus on how much a particular programming language supports the material. I got to page 70 where Satnam is talking about the various ways in which you can build a Tag Cloud and there is my name... referencing my white paper on tag clouds :)
So, if Satnam is reading this, "Thanks!".
The funny thing is that I feel more "famous" for having been mentioned in someone else's book than I do for having my name as the author or co-author on 13 other .NET-related books that I've seen on shelves in Borders or Barnes and Noble. This experience almost makes me want to dig up the source code to the social bookmarking website I created back in '06... almost :)
Kevin,
Thanks for reading my book and writing the wonderful whitepaper, "In search
of ...the Perfect Tag Cloud" -- it was very useful. Do post a review on
Amazon.
best wishes,
Satnam
Satnam... just posted the review... I didn't even know I had that ability
with the account I had on Amazon :) Thanks for stopping by the blog!
Thanks, Kevin for taking the time out to post a review on Amazon,
appreciate it! Looking forward to your next book and I will check out your
14 books! Its very impressive to have written 14 books -- writing one was
quite an effort for me.
best wishes,
Satnam
