Tuesday, August 5, 2008

More Fun with Word Clouds

As you can now see on the left-hand side of this page, I've added tag cloud for this blog. It was a piece of cake thanks to these great directions.

That cloud is only made up of the labels that I've selected for each post, but I've also been playing around with a site that generates clouds like the ones in my previous post that are based on the frequency of words in a given body of text. Wordle is far and away the most attractive one that I've been able to find. If you enter a link it will only generate a cloud based on whatever is on the front page, but with a little bit of copying and pasting I was able to produce this word cloud out of all of my posts:

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Obama does well in the clouds

Since I started playing around with Goodreads, I've been exploring the odd aesthetics of tag clouds (aka word clouds), and I'm still debating whether I want to add one to this site.

This morning I came across an interesting meta-data experiment conducted by the Washington Post in which they generated word clouds based on the two presidential candidate's campaign blogs. The one on the left if Obama's and McCain's is on the right.

If you've got sharp eyes, you may actually be able to find the "McCain" tag.