As Amazon affiliates would readily know (if you are not already an affiliate, don’t worry, just read on), when a visitor clicks on an affiliate link and buys anything within 24 hours from Amazon, the entire order amount is considered for the affiliate fee. So, say a visitor comes to your website, clicks on a phrase called “digital photography” and ends up on Amazon, and ends up buying a book and a digital camera, one worth $24 and the other $98, then the camera being an electronic device, gives 4% commission, which is close to $4 and the book can give close to $1.50 at a 6% rate (assuming you reached the 6% tier by selling more than 6 items). So, that easily nets the affiliate more than $5. If this happens a few times in an year, the Cloud View would have paid for itself.

Frankly, when Cloud View was introduced, the initial intent is to help the web masters and designers to place a cool looking widget. Some of our customers who are web designers are very happy to get a license for their own customers. We just charge very little (you can find the latest price by visiting the official Cloud View web page) for the software and don’t ask how much the web designers are charging their customers .

We are glad to find yet another use for our product. If you have other ideas, let us know.

Welcome to Cloud View.

Usually one of the key concerns for users is whether the cloud generator can easily integrate into their existing website or content management system that may have been written in Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby On Rails or Java Servlets, JSP, heck even Scala’s Lift framework or any of the future programming languages and webservers. After understanding this key concern, ToCloud has come up with an innovative solution that supports integrating into any of these frameworks.

How does it work? Simple. The Cloud View has a server component and a client component. The server component is written in Perl and runs as a cgi script. The client component is written in JavaScript and uses AJAX to generate the combination. This architecture is what makes it possible to provide Cloud View as a platform independent solution.

Still wondering how this is possible? Read on!

First, when a user makes a request to a webpage, it is served using whatever programming language you have written it in. You also embed a small javascript code into this HTML page. Once the page is loaded, the entire page content is sent back to the Cloud View cgi script on your server using an AJAX request. The cgi script generates the cloud and returns back the word cloud HTML which is then rendered on the page. So, rather than integrating the word cloud generation as part of the webpage generation, the page is first generated and then unobtrusively sent back to the sever using an AJAX request and then the word cloud is rendered. This will not slow down your initial page loading as the word cloud generation happens separately!

ToCloud technology is being used by web masters who are trying to improve their advertising revenue. This has also been used in marketing, medical research, PhD thesis just to name a few. Now with the possibility of seamless integration irrespective of the platform, we also expect this to be very useful to corporate users who want to provide a quick view of their content rich internal documents available in content management systems (CMS) to their employees.

Are you excited! Visit Cloud View and find out how to get this.

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After gathering statistics over the last few months, we have seen this concept being successful. We managed to get web traffic to the site and able to make some money from Amazon Affiliate program. For any successful affiliate program, there are two key ingredients required

1. Bringing traffic to your affiliate site
2. Engaging the traffic to spend time on the site and find something that helps the user make the purchasing decision

While the first of these depends on Search Engine Optimization, buying traffic through online advertising, link-building and other techniques, the later is entirely within the control of the web master. There is a saying that goes “You can only bring a horse to the water, you can’t make it drink”. Same way, with the first of the above steps, it’s only possible to bring in traffic to the website. Spending time at the website and eventually completing the transaction by clicking the affiliate link depends on what compelling value you add to the website.

From our experience, we believe that the Image Clouds offer that value proposition to our users. They are able to stop and spend time in looking at the various products and decide on the product they are interested in without having to go through too much of navigation.

However, we identified a potential problem. Many times, people search for something and end up at our website. But once they are on the website, how do they get to the exact information they are looking for? Since the image cloud is an image and the content is by default hidden and shown only when the user puts the mouse over a given product, there is no way for the user to quickly search for the string using which he/she landed on the site.

After realizing this issue and some careful thought, we enhanced our Image Clouds with the ability to search! Yes, check out Wii Games & Accessories for example. If the user ends up here searching for a specific game, then by typing in the same string in the “search this page” field, the user can immediately and visually see where the matching products are on the image cloud. All the matching clouds are highlighted.

This technology is implemented using JavaScript, DHTML and CSS. Here is how it is done

1. Using JavaScript we identify the matching products with the appropriate regular expression tested against the product details
2. Using CSS & DHTML we show the number of products that are found
3. From the HTML MAP’s AREA elements, identify the top corner of each map area that is a rectangle.
4. Using CSS (z-Index and position properties), we are able to place the highlighters on top left corner of each of the matching product’s map area within the image cloud.

That’s it and hopefully this helps us engage our visitors more on the site and see even higher conversion rates.

So, as you can see, the concept of tag clouds can be expanded beyond tagging. Essentially it’s mining textual data to provide useful information.

There are 5 stages in creating these product catalogs.

Fetch Product Data Using Amazon’s ECS Web Service, and using Perl, the product information of various product categories are fetched. This is implemented using perl. The product data is available as an XML response which is parsed and captured as perl data structure. This part of the program is a standalone module that can be used for other concepts around Amazon ECS.

Fetch The Product Images From the image information within the product data, an image for each product is fetched and staged. This is again implemented in perl making use of wget. Sometimes, but rarely, amazon’s image cache servers don’t respond and so the process gets stuck. So, we use wget’s timeout parameter to timeout beyond 10 seconds. This helps most of the time as it happens only for a couple of images occasionally. There are times when the server is completely down. In this case, we simply change the ec1 to ec2 in the url and then use their other server. Some of this at present is a manual process, and we need to find a way to completely automate the process inspite of such a hiccup from the server.

Generate Image Cloud Data The Image Cloud program itself is written to be generic, so that we could also do such things as 2008 cars image clouds. Hence, in this step, the product information available as xml documents is converted into a data format that the Image Cloud program can understand. At this time the Image Cloud is not completely generic, it has some knowledge of list price, sales price and such details to change the color of the border of each image in the cloud. With more object orientation, it should be possible to make it more generic. This is also implemented in Perl.

Generate Image Cloud This is the step which actually takes the data which contains the image urls, and the cloud weights that are used in generating the image cloud. The program is written in Java, but in a script format (BeanShell). The reason for choosing Java is since I am already familiar with javax.imageio.* and Java AWT/Swing to do image processing. The reason for using BeanShell instead of just Java is well, it offers rapid development which is very desirable especially when working on new ideas that have never been there before to go with an existing algorithm/code/pseudo-code. Anyway, we first find the min and max values, then determine the layout of the cloud based on the image size of each image adjusted to the cloud weight and then finally render the image. And while rendering the image, since the coordinates of each image is available, the HTML fragment for image maps is also generated.

Generate HTML Once the gif is ready and the image map fragment is ready, now it’s time to generate the complete html file with menus and whatever the page should look like. So, this step is the final step that does this. This is again done in Perl. To provide the onmouseover effect for the image cloud, we use JavaScript. The image map generated in the previous step generates the html with onmouseover event passing a unique id of each of the image. In case of cloudstore, it happens to be Amazon product’s ASIN. When generating the HTML, the product details are aslo generated as hidden div elements which show up through the onmouseover event handler.

That’s pretty much it!