This evening while browsing the 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year I came across Wordle, a wonderful tool for building word clouds.
What are word clouds? We’ve actually already got our own rather dull cloud of post tags tag cloud way down there on the right hand column. In this case the categories most often used are larger and the categories less often used are smaller.
The first cloud below is based on all the words in recent posts on YAR and the second on all recent comments on YAR. The bigger the word, the more often it is used. I think you’ll agree its a fun and informative look.:
YAR posts
YAR comments
Note that both of these representations are fleeting as they change as soon as the next comment or post is added.
My first thought after reading this post: Type the same cuss word over and over again in so it would come up real big in the word cloud….I spend too much time around high schoolers.
I’ve used Wordle a lot. It’s a lot of fun, though I will say that after a couple of days, you get sort of bored with it. But it is indeed interesting to see the results, and how you can manipulate them.
The word “boats” was very large in the posts-word-cloud. I had never realized people post that much about boats. The comments-word-cloud was about what I expected.
Skylark, I think I used the words boats a ton in the last two weeks. First, I used it about 27 times in my post about something-or-other. Then, I used it about six times in a comment about bicycles.
Sorry, but most of my stuff has been gibberish lately.