(This is a restored post; comments lost).
I’ve been having fun playing with Wordle. This is a visualization of Buzzmachine as of yesterday, when I had a fair amount about NPR and radio. One answer to my API question below is that I’d like to see a Wordle visualization of every day’s Times or Guardian as another way to see hot topics and another path to them.
Here’s a Wordle of NYTimes.com and below that is one for Guardian.co.uk. Note that they are necessarily unsatisfying because they are just the home pages; I’d find it more interesting to look at the corpus of content today with weighting for the prioritization given that content by editors or readers. Anyway, you still get to see the top topics in each place and publication:
Top topics: Barack (very big), withdrawl, slowdown, Dow, prices, scrimping.
Top topics: Washington (very big), church/Episcopal/African (on the denomination’s meeting and schism), Madeleine/Murat (on a big libel settlement).
we had fun creating a few Wordle’s using a large number of tweets – we’ll do more once Wordle is trends higher. If you’d like, we can do one for you. A win/win someday would be if we and the creator of Wordle could make money on our services – maybe through Etsy
lol
@jack http://tweetip.us/lkze9
@crystal http://tweetip.us/lketd
@scobleizer http://tweetip.us/lk5qe
The link in paragraph one should be to http://wordle.net/ not http://wordle.com/
I too am deeply sympathetic from the get-go that wordle could be a valuable tool for navigating the news: another path couldn’t hurt, right? But as soon as my enthusiasm starts, my hand-wringing follows. I worry that wordle’s more lava lamp than tool, prettier than useful.
How will we know when we meet a visualization of the news that’s actually really useful? Can some visualization of the news lay not just another path to the “hot topic” but a better one? Or will headlines make a successful transition from the analog past of news to its digital future as the standard way we find what we want to read?
(Full disclosure: of course, my answer’s no, and that’s part of the basis for my under-wraps startup.)
[...] través el blog BuzzMachine de Jeff Jarvis sobre esta herramienta que permite hacer nubes de tags automáticamente y te permite editar el lay [...]
Wordle – Crie nuvens de palavras…
Foi através do Mundo Digital que fiquei a conhecer o Wordle.
O Wordle permite criar uma espécie de “nuvem de palavras” através de um texto, um site ou de uma conta do del.icio.us.
A forma como as palavras são dispostas pode ser alterad…
[...] BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Wordle it. var disqus_url = ‘http://marshalsandler.com/?p=4614 ‘; var disqus_title = ‘BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Wordle it’; var disqus_message = ‘BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Wordle it.%0A’; View the entire comment thread. [...]
[...] Posted in Business by Douglas Karr at 6:42 pm Wordle hit the blogosphere a couple weeks ago and bloggers have been buzzing! Wordle is a Java application that transforms your tag cloud into a thing of [...]
[...] tag clouds powered by wordle. Bloggers of all stripes posted a wordle of their blog. Some, like Jeff Jarvis, mused about how the visualizations represent “another way way to see hot topics and another path to [...]
[...] saw a post about it when I was reading my feeds and thought I’d give it a try. Basically Wordle creates a word [...]
[...] Wordle it [...]
On Sunday night, I went through this exact exercise to help refocus and reassess my blog at gaffney3.com. Wordle.net was invaluable in my refining its overall message by its visual representation of the topics and keywords I was choosing.
Anyway, here’s my post:
http://gaffney3.com/2008/08/17/wordle-as-an-online-marketing-and-seo-tool/
And my Wordles:
http://wordle.net/gallery?username=billgaffney
Jonathan Feinberg qualifies Wordle as a toy, but I would suggest to anyone writing a blog that it be looked at as a powerful tool.
- Bill Gaffney
[...] Jarvis at BuzzMachine has a great post about wordle from late July. Check it out. Posted in Uncategorized [...]
[...] blog. My suspicion is that he’s been saving up this New Building Block piece, making due with fun pointers to the serious topic while buried in his [...]
World news using word cloud + recency by size:
http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm
Highly recommended.