I just found myself on Wordle.net. I hadn’t heard of it before, but Google throws up some 900,000 results, so I’m guessing it’s already pretty popular.
Anyway, the site generates ‘word clouds’ which give you a visual representation of the most common words in a piece of text.
Here’s the result for the last few posts on this blog:
So, you can see quite easily that my recent posts have concentrated heavily on marketing and communications, and that I’ve been keeping track of business awards.
It seems to me that Wordle could be a very useful tool to help keep your marketing literature – or indeed your blog – on track. It could even be used to test for keyword frequency with a view to improving search ranking.
I’ll be posting ‘Wordles’ for my blog again, so it’ll be interesting to see how it changes over time.
In the meantime, why not try Wordle on your own blog?
I did a tagcrowd.com cloud on wikipedias’s article on web2.0 a while ago.
I joined the words together in order of size and got this:
“Web2.0. Web based applications that allow users to collaborate with each other to generate, share and edit content.”
Thanks for that, Rob – determiners and prepositions etc. added afterwards, I presume? I’ll have to try that myself. I hear analysing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in such a fashion offers a rather succinct explanation of the meaning of life.
Seriously though, I actually learned about Wordle by reading an article on Smarta.com, detailing the use of Worldle on Alistairs Darling’s budget speech.
I was particularly impressed by the way they used Wordle to highlight key themes covered in the budget, and to lament the surprisingly low number of references to business. Good stuff.
What a good idea – looking at content for word frequency and keyword frequency.
I see that Wordle allows users to put in a URL, as long as it is a site that has an RSS or Atom feed. I just did it with our blog and some of the words that feature strongly were quite surprising. Well worth doing.