Wouldn’t you know it, if I just would have waited a wee bit longer some smart people would have saved me hours of time. For those of you following I started cut-and-pasting some people’s blogs (male thought leaders and female thought leaders) into Many Eyes in order to create more accurate tag clouds of what they were talking about.
From there, JP Rangaswami asked me to create some Tweetclouds for him, so I did. But wouldn’t you know it, a couple of interesting website have sprung up so that will do all the work for you.
TagCrowd
My man Ken Burbary (@kenburbary) tipped me off to TagCrowd. You can either simply type the URL of any website in or upload a file and it will create a cloud for you. I tried it on a number of site and while it did create a nice looking cloud, obviously the entire site isn’t crawled. The clouds I looked at were clearly limited to the one URL I pointed to. Here’s the one that got spat out when I pointed to this blog.
TweetClouds 
Seemingly more accurate is Tweetclouds, which pulls the text from your Twitter archives and creates a cloud for you. I liked that there was an option to omit the directed comments to others so that the analysis was limited to only original statements. I was sorta surprised that “thanks” and “love” were words I used a lot. On the downside, I’ve tried getting to Tweetclouds’ website for about a week and it seems to always be down. So, as with anything, your mileage may vary.
This stuff should be built into blog software
There are two things missing from blog software:
- Auto generating clouds like this stuff.
- Auto blog rolls which show who you really frequent.
These sorts of clouds (and ultimately blog rolls) are so much more truthful and valuable. I hope there’s even more innovation in this category.
It’s too bad it’s all going downhill fast since they sold, despite their all star (never consulted) board.
