captsolo weblog

The picture above is a word cloud generated from recent content of this blog, created using Wordle.

Wordle is a service for creating “word clouds” from the text or feed provided. Users can then change cloud layouts, fonts and colors in order to a visually attractive representation of word frequency in the source text. Final result can be saved to a gallery.

These “word clouds” are more interesting to me as a blog author compared with tag clouds. In the latter you would not find many surprises because you already know what tags you typically assign to posts. Word clouds can be more interesting because they are created automatically based on the “raw” content of blog posts and they can contain some surprises.

Do you think there are ways to make these word clouds (1) more interactive and (2) useful for machines too?

On the interactive side of things one could make a list of matching posts appear when you select a word from the cloud.

As for making this information reusable by software I do not have a clear answer, but one could adapt SCOT (Social Semantic Cloud of Tags) ontology to express word clouds. MOAT (Meaning of a Tag) ontology is also nearby but not sure how it would fit into this use case.

See also:

• CaptSolo blog word cloud in Wordle’s gallery. Has the same content as the image above, but it has a different and more colorful layout with black background (update: added a snapshot of it after “read more").
• Wordle concept maps at leobard’s blog: “A quick and fun tool to make nice calligraphically-good-looking tag clouds out of your own tags (works with delicious)”

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