I have to say that Tag Clouds have got to be one of the neatest developments to have emerged from Web 2.0.
Today I used a Creative Commons site TagCrowds to create a Tag Cloud of just inaugurated New York Governor Elliot Spitzer’s State of the State Address.
I’m actually a huge fan of Spitzer and see potentially great things to come from his administration if he tackles the problems of New York the way he tackled the problems of Wall Street and corrupt companies. I remember years ago before he was known at all I heard him give the keynote speech before an audience of investment house professionals and I was shocked to hear him lecture the group on their ethics–who was this person I wondered–what chutzpah he has as an invited speaker to go after his audience–and then came the lawsuits…
I’m going to be experimenting and thinking a bit about the use of TagClouds for business researchers–if you have tried anything or have thoughts on it–please speak up.
Also–Happy New Year!
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You might also be interested in the work we are doing at The Personal Bee to create phrase clouds from aggregated articles. We are also experimenting with topic analysis.
Here is an example for the Web 2.0 content area:
http://www.personalbee.com/227/buzziest
And if you look at the top left corner, the five phrases in the box labeled “Top Buzz” are the top 5 topics, based on the phrases in the cloud.
Essentially what we are doing is extracting phrases from all of the aggregated articles and analyzing these phrases against historical records for the use of these phrases within each of the sources. This allows us to identify not just frequently mentioned phrases but time relevant emergent phrases…
Comment by Ted — January 31, 2007 @ 6:38 pm