10 thought leaders, boiled down
After my post on cross-department collaboration metrics, I started checking out Many Eyes, a nice visualization toolset from IBM. There, I saw that by uploading plain text, you could create a tag cloud from anything. I thought it might be pretty cool to copy an entire blog and then check out what someone’s actual tag cloud was. That way, I could see the weighted topics most important to that person. So, I randomly chose a number of blogs I read and meticulously cut and pasted post after post. In 
some cases there were so many posts that I gave up after a month’s worth. In other cases, I went further back.
It’s sort of funny to boil people down to just few words. Once I generated each person’s cloud, I’d note their top ten words, and place them next to their picture. Those words became a sort of micro vcard. I definitely learned a little more about each person.
All this reminded me of a post that Danah Boyd did a few years ago comparing the tag clouds of different social networks. It was a nice way to view a dashboard into what what was being said at the top-level. That got me thinking that it would be cool to go the next step and create a “macro cloud” out of everyone’s top 10 words. That cloud is at the very bottom of this post.
Some thing’s I learned:
- The macro conversation is about “People” and “Work”
- Microsoft is most likely inflated given the Microhoo announcement
- Some people had a single keyword that jumped out, others were more balanced
- Everyone’s cloud was a little different when you switched from one word to two word views. Check it out yourself, I added links to the live clouds.
- It would be cool if our clouds were just auto-generated based on the content of our posts.
Depending on how interesting this is to everyone, I plan to do this again but use companies and their competitors vs individual bloggers.
1. Robert Scoble
Perhaps no surprise that Microsoft jumped the hardest for Scoble given the Microhoo announcement and the fact he used to work there. My favorite Scoble word, though, is “interesting.” It really shows how curious he is. In the two-word view, “cell phone,” “fast company,” “creative commons,” and “Microsoft Research” stood out.
2. Jeremiah Owyang
Jeremiah was one of the people who had one word jump out way beyond the others. No surprise, in his two-word view it’s everything “social” (social networks, social media, social computing, social graph and more).
3. Andrew McAfee
Andrew had a more balanced tag cloud in the one word view, though his two word view is everything “Enterprise 2.0.” I was impressed that one of his common words was “flow.”
4. J.P. Rangaswami
The two things I learned about J.P. is that he’s very attracted to Hugh McLeod’s social object theory and he’s interested in efficiency. In his two word view, “social object” has a lot of gravity as does all his comments around “waste” (time and products).
5. Hugh McLeod
If you follow Hugh, then it shouldn’t be a surprise that “social object,” and “social market” came up in his two-word view. Or even that “Blue Monster,” popped up. It was interesting that “years ago” was a common phrase.
6. Dennis Howlett
No surprise that the word “enterprise” emerged for Dennis. Though in his two-word view, it was all about the “enterprise irregulars.” Interestingly, so did the word “customer base.”
7. Shel Israel
Nice guy, Shel, is another one with heavily weighted words. In the single word view it’s all about “social,” “media” and “people.” His two-word view, is extra dramatic with “social media” dominating everything else.
8. Stowe Boyd
If you read or know Stowe, you know he loves to travel. No wonder Dopplr was his top keyword. Stowe was the only one to have the word “experience” raise up as a top ten word. And in his two-word cloud, he had lots of interesting combos like “chief designer,” “martial arts,” and “taking place.”
9. Chris Brogan
It was the mid-sized words in Chris’ cloud that are filled with energy. Words like “build,” “project,” and “feel.” His two-word cloud was dominated by “social media” and “social networks” but also had interesting combos like, “closed loop,” “great people,” “great place” and “opinion matters.”
10. Chuck Hollis
Chuck is an old-school EMC guy, recently converted to Social Software. The cloud is especially interesting in that it matches the rest of the folks above but Chuck is the only actual enterprise customer of Social Software in this list.
11. Me
I couldn’t resist running the analysis on my own blog. Both my one-word and two-word clouds were pretty much what I would guess they’d be. You know, filled with buzz words and the word “social.”
The Macro Cloud
Here is what everyone’s top 10 words look like combined into their own macro cloud. It will be interesting to combine this macro cloud with other ones I do in the future.
Spread the word
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Things people have said about this post
[…] New to reading me and want a hundred word summary? Sam Lawrence of Jive Software has compiled tag clouds of 10 bloggers he reads and has done a quick and dirty analysis of what we f…. […]
SO interesting… what a thoughtful and specific way to analyze a blog. Made me want to go back and re-read Cluetrain as I thought about people vs. “objects.”
Love the two ideas from:
* Marilyn Pratt (marilynpratt) “for interesting demographics try women, you know the usual suspects”
* Dennis Howlett: “parse the words a company uses against a selection of the words that are used about them to identify connections and disconnects”
Also, @chrisbrogan, I also looked at my cloud and wondered if I wasn’t spending enough time on the smaller topics that actually were more important to me.
Great project, thanks! How about a similar project for Fortune 100 B2B companies? Maybe even limit them to the Tech industries in order to compare oranges with oranges. With that data, you could then look at other industries and B2C. The gaps will jump out!
Blimey - this is an interesting exercise. I’m thinking about all the work that went into this. A real labor of love. Or is that blood, sweat and tears?
Sam
Good job. Very interesting. Wonder if that helps “identify” and give the elevator pitch for bloggers?
That was really interesting. Thanks for sharing that. I actually read the whole thing, weird for me to read text blogs.
Do you guys have any suggestions for the next pass at this? People or companies you’d be interested in seeing a cloud for?
[…] expecting, but interesting. And then today I was alerted to the fact that he’d just written this story; all I can say is that Sam’s a brave man. He’s not the first to call me names, and […]
It would be interesting to watch the keywords for each author over time. You might see who is leading and who is chiming in. You’d probably see something like zeitgeist.
The top 10 words might not do it though. Might have to get a bit more inventive to see the patterns.
Excellent post Sam. It would be awesome to see the process you did built into people profiles automatically. For example, imagine if FriendFeed combined all the data from what it gathers and built a cloud from that… awesome stuff.
Really interesting post - but only men analysed Sam? Where are the women?
Damn Sam, you just keep coming up with the most interesting posts!
Great Post …love the concept..unfortunately I either dont know how to or dont have the tools to use clouds as a “personl” tool or on sites where I would like to eg.my own google reader or notebook , or my own blogger blog. I wouldlove to see this concept used on a site that has many book reviews ( Amazon or maybe Visual Bookshelf) - if three words leap out of a many reviews on a particular book it wil provide the shortest , quickest way to decide whether the book will grab me or not.
Go Big Always - 10 thought leaders, boiled down…
Go Big Always is Sam Lawrence s blog…
Nice. ManyEyes has lots of really interesting visualizations, I wish they (well, technically ‘we’ since I work at IBM) would add more features to the text ones. In particular I’d like a way to take these same data sets and see how the weightings change over time. When did each word usage peak, for instance.
Here’s my photo-blog summary: http://www.seemsartless.com/index.php?pic=1313
This is really interesting stuff. I’m grateful to have been included, and further thrilled that PEOPLE was my top word, as it’s core to my thinking.
Oddly, I’ll admit that I found myself looking at my list critically, saying, “Why don’t you talk more about community than you talk about networks?” I also laughed at the word “things” which is probably high up there for “Getting Things Done.” It gave me something to look at, for sure.
Sam, you’re truly one of the freshest voices in this space right now. Thanks for this.
[…] This post by Sam Lawrence is fascinating. He says: I thought it might be pretty cool to copy an entire blog and then check out what someone’s actual tag cloud was. That way, I could see the weighted topics most important to that person. So, I randomly chose a number of blogs I read and meticulously cut and pasted post after post. In some cases there were so many posts that I gave up after a month’s worth. In other cases, I went further back. […]
[…] Lawrence from Jive Software is on a roll. His latest blog post, 10 Thought Leaders Boiled Down to 10 Words, holds a few folks in this space (including me) to the words we use on our blogs. The cloud was […]
There’s so many ways of looking at this kind of thing but I believe this is more about people than anything else. However, someone said to me today it would be interesting to parse the words a company uses against a selection of the words that are used about them to identify connections and disconnects.
Neat experiment, great analysis and breakdown.
Great post and great blog.
fyi - stowe boyd pic reads “Shel Isreal”
… cool clouds, nice compilation cloud
Very compelling data visualizations, Sam. Nice work!
“great visualizations” said one, “compelling” said another. yes but what does it all mean?
This is amazing and compelling. Visualizing the conversations this way helps to break them down into more core components.
Thanks!
[…] From there, it is a small step to visualizing the results in something like the Many Eyes which Sam Lawrence talked about […]
Beautiful work =D Although, I’m a big fan of bottom up - what were their least used words? Could be quite insightful to see what concepts are stretches for notable minds, or maybe secret desires or fears.
The question is - would it be fair?
Hey wow this is cool. that Many Eyes tool looks very promising. Here’s a thought: what about taking those top 10 words in each cloud and look at them in a word tree view, to see what each bloggers’ buzzwords articulate with.
Sam - have seen a few demos of Many Eyes, but not a dive like this. Really interesting. There’s got to be an easier way to pipe the raw data in though, as I agree with other posters, doing this to see how the landscape morphs over time would be interesting. Great photos to represent those chosen - reminds me I need some “edgier” photos of myself… where’s candid camera when you need it?
[…] After I posted the 10 boiled thought leaders I read, I noticed (as did others) that they were all dudes. Probably not a surprise given the population of dudes in tech but lots of people said, “Hey! what about the women?” […]
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[…] just finished another cut-n-paste-a-thon. In February it focused on scraping out a couple of month’s worth of blog posts and pasting […]
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