It's not you, it's us. Really.

I've had many people write in lately confused or upset about TagCloud.
It seems like lots of folks have created clouds but continue to see
the dreaded "This cloud has no data" message. When we launched the
service in June, TagCloud was able to provide analysis within minutes.
Now it's taking several days. The simple fact is that the size of our
userbase has grown to the point that we have a backlog of feeds to
analyze. If you see a feed listed on your cloud's list, then our
system likes it. We can grab it and analyze it. We're just way behind
right now. You've done everything correctly.

The problem is, we've outgrown our current hosting setup. The database
is too big, the site traffic is too high, and we're basically
mirroring a nice subsection of the blogosphere. We're also assuming
the traffic of the sites that put a TagCloud on their pages. Think of
the name of the most popular tag-related website. I love that site.
Since TagCloud does automated tagging, I'm quite positive that we are
storing a lot more tags that those guys. Despite all of these
challenges, the good news is, right now this is a hardware scalabilty
issue.

I'm pleased to announce that we are partnering with a large web
hosting company and will be moving our site to a new hosting
infrastructure in the coming weeks. There will no doubt be a couple
bumps in the transition, and maybe some interesting changes, but this
hosting opportunity will give us the machine power we need to improve
the quality of service.

I want to thank everyone who has tried out our service, and I
especially want to thank everyone who's written us. We've had people
send artwork, site badges, tutorials, and all kinds of interesting
uses of the service. My favorite implementation was a site that had a
TagCloud of "right-wing" blogs versus "left wing" blogs. Good stuff.
I've had graduate students write in telling me that the information we
provide has helped in research, often times better than some of the
expensive academic search engines out there. That's the kind of thing
we want to embrace and continue to grow.

So, keep the ideas flowing. We will use this mailing list to answer
the popular questions, post news, and talk about the cool stuff that
people are doing with TagCloud. It's your responsibility to let us
know what you like and don't like, features you'd like to see, and
anything else that can make this thing cool.

2006 is gonna be fun!
John Herren