I created the “word cloud” above at Wordle.net using three and half years of blog entries from our site. The larger the word, the more frequently it has appeared on our blog. Wordle crunches the text you give it down to the top n words (n=150 for the image above) and arranges them according to numerous options you can set. It’s pretty slick. The main limitation is that you have to paste the text into the web form. So, for example, you can’t just give it a URL and have it go grab the text and then create the cloud. I think a clever feature would be for Wordle to process RSS feeds!

Anyway, I did it the old fashioned way by extracting all the post content from my blog’s database, scrubbing out all the embedded HTML code, and copying all 400+ KB to my clipboard.

Update: The Wordle.net website has added the feature to create a word cloud from an RSS feed!

This entry was posted by Steve on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Internet/Web, Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.