You'll find this MyST Topic Cloud Product Briefing useful as well as this blog post.

While the underlying keyword map for a topic cloud is generated upon request, there is a caching process that introduces some latency. Any updates to a blogsite that affect the topic cloud are immedately available in Topic Cloud, but may not appear for a few hours.

Topic clouds are not being submitted to search engines. Instead, they are naturally discovered search crawlers as soon as we install it into your blogsite.

We integrate Topic Cloud directly into your blogsite. Please contact your reseller or MyST Technology Partners for more details.

You can publish a link to your topic cloud or send it to friends and colleagues via email. It is a URL like any other blogsite URL.

Example:

http://your-blogsite-domain/topics

As is the case with all MyST services, Topic Cloud provides all data as XML. For example, this URL returns the keyword map for this FAQ channel.

http://blogsite.com/topics?model=none

The beauty of a topic cloud is that it covers the entire blogsite.

Typically, each blogsite has one topic cloud that encapsulates all blog posts and content items across the entire blogsite. This makes it possible to easily see all relevant information in the blogsite.

It is also possible to scale the cloud down to just a specific blog channel, but this requires a little additional configuration effort.

There are many aspects of MyST Topic Cloud™ and each provides a unique benefit. Some users simply use it as an alternative search or navigation tool, while blogsite authors use it as an analytical tool.

The quickest way to learn about using a topic cloud is to click the help button () at the top of any topic cloud page.  This button displays integrated help panes—right in the topic cloud page—that introduce each element of the page.

While MyST Topic Cloud™ and services like TagCloud begin with a similar user interface element (i.e., weighted keywords presented as a "cloud"), there are many functional differences. Here are a few of them:

• MyST Topic Cloud™ uses a rich set of content meta data including human-authored keywords and key phrases, machine generated keywords, create/modify timestamps, author identities, etc.  TagClouds use only machine generated keywords.
• MyST Topic Cloud™ supports the concept of "untagged" content, making it easy to discover content that is not easily identified (through traditional search tools) .  This is particularly useful for authors and content managers.  TagClouds do not support this concept.
• MyST Topic Cloud™ present a multifaceted UI—cloud views, tag taxonomy views, and tagged content views—to help you discover and navigate between related subject matter. This becomes increasingly valuable as the amount of content grows.  TagCloud presents a single-level UI—there is one cloud and each tag in the cloud tag leads to a traditional search result.
• MyST Topic Cloud™ supports random search functionality with advanced options such as regular expression pattern matching and topic type filtering (e.g., search author names, modification dates, etc.)  TagClouds do not support random search functionality or discoverability based on types of tags.
• MyST Topic Cloud™ honors the underlying MySmartChannels permissions model, allowing both secure and public presentation.  Each users sees only content for which they have appropriate permissions.  TagClouds do no have an underlying permissions model and are based on public content.
• MyST Topic Clouds™ are "mergable" — Multiple MyST Topic Clouds can be merged to form larger, more comprehensive clouds that map a collection of multiple blogsites and/or other content sources. The underlying topic mapping technology uses each cloud's taxonomy to guide the merge process.  TagCloud does not support merging.
• MyST Topic Clouds™ can be downsized — Every "topic" in the Topic Cloud is available as a sub-cloud. This offeres greater discovery options as users navigate from abstract topics to less abstract topis. Tag clouds offer no such UI agility.
• MyST Topic Cloud™ includes an integrated topic server that supports "tag" URLs (similar to services such as Technorati, del.icio.us, etc.). The topic server is branded to your blogsite domain.

A tag family is a collection of tags related to a specific tag. For example, a tag for RSS might include the following tags in its family. Unlike tag clouds, Topic Cloud provides a view of specific tags in context within the tag family of related topics.

• business RSS
• enterprise RSS
• RSS branding
• RSS adoption

MyST Topic Cloud™ present a multifaceted UI including a tag taxonomy view to help you discover and navigate between related subject matter.

The tag taxonomy presents a hierarchical list of tags in context to the level of the cloud you have drilled into (Example: http://blogsite.com/topics/RSS). The tags are identified with icons that make it easy to see primary tags () and more abstract tags (). The expandable hierachy and organization of the tags allow you to quickly spot content items () and content channels ().

The taxonomy organizes tags in terms of their relationship to primary tags. An abstract tag is part of key-phrase (or primary tag) in a blog post. This makes it possible to drill into topics and quickly find posts of interest.

The Tag Server provides direct access to tags in the topic cloud through a simplified URL. Examples:

• http://blogsite.com/topics/RSS
• http://blogsite.com/topics/RSS+growth

The Topic Cloud Tag Server makes it easier to create Topic Cloud URL's.

A secure (private) MyST Topic Cloud™ is included at no extra charge in all MyST Blogsite levels. A secure topic cloud provides authors and managers with an analytical tool to better understand how keywords are being used in their blogsite. It also provides an alternative browsable interface and search capability.

A public topic cloud is included at no extra charge in all MyST Blogsite service levels with one exception.  Our most basic, single channel service level does not include topic cloud as as standard feature.  In this case, topic cloud is available as an optional add-on.  Please contact us for specific details.

MyST Platform is an umbrella term covering MyST Blogsite™, MySmartChannels™ Weblog Application Server, and MyST Web Services Platform™, and other web service technologies from MyST Technology Partners.

Topic clouds present HTML web pages (and XML documents) that can be indexed by search engines.  Search engines benefit from a topic cloud's well organized, structured taxonomy that aids search engines in both discovering and accurately classifying blogsite content items.