In Barcelona I showed off my timecloud widget. Then someone /* thx: a ;) */ asked if it is possible to add tagclouds to the European database of laws, eur-lex. This was the birth of bonobo.
Bonobo is a greasmonkey script which automatically retrieves the tagclouds for all legislative text available in HTML. All you need is the Greasemonkey Firefox plugin and bonobo. According to wikipedia this script might also work on other browsers than Firefox.
If you have both greasemonkey and bonobo installed, start browsing here for example.
Bonobo gets the tagcloud information from a back-end server, which retrieves, caches and converts the legislative texts to tagclouds. Like Bonobo this back-end server is also part of a set of tools trying to cut through the fog of legislation. If you're interested in the code (AGPLv3) visit the project on github.
Please bear in mind, that this back-end server is running in a quite unstable environment. It might happen, that you're not served your tagclouds. If anyone can donate some spare hosting for this service, that would be awesome. It would really feel at home on a Debian server. ;)
I have some other ideas queued already for further developments, check this project github page regularly.
~stef/blog/
