Here's a "wordle" of our blog posts

• Nick Rougeux
• August 29, 2008

CommunityCollab will include various "tag clouds"—data visualizations that represent which cities site participants are from, their areas of expertise, and the organizations where they work.

In tag clouds, the more often a word appears in a body of text, the larger it appears in the related tag cloud. 

Today, I ran across an interesting implementation of a tag cloud called a "wordle" (http://wordle.net) It's basically a tag cloud with artistic variations. Colors can be changed, fonts are variable, and layouts can be adjusted.

I created a wordle with the RSS feed from our blog here. Here's a larger version, and a place where you can create your own wordle.

Tag clouds are "data visualizations" that aim to provide some insight into the text they represent. It's interesting that some of the largest words in our tag cloud are people, can, get, help, which is much of what this site is about.

On the Wall Street Journal site is a tag cloud of presidential nominees' acceptance speeches. One can envision political campaigns using tag clouds of their oponents' speeches, ads, and other campaign materials to gain insights into how messages are changing, in order to respond more quickly and effectively.

The LA Times has tag clouds of some of the speeches at the Democratic convention. Presumably, they will do the same for the Republicans.

The New York Times has an interesting tag cloud-like graphic depicting all the major speeches at the two political conventons.