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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