Tuesday, March 24, 2009

CNN discovers word clouds

After President's Barack Obama's second live press conference tonight, CNN's Wolf Blitzer announced one of the network's with grand fanfare.

The president words were vomited, I mean, presented in a "Word Cloud," which kind of took the speech out of context and provides no insight whatsoever.

Word clouds are nothing new in cyberspace. They're "clouds" of text that give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the text of a source. Clouds, like the one below, about the entire Twitter universe, abound (even though there is no reason why).



Furthermore, you can make a cloud out of anything, thanks to www.wordle.net.

Case in point, here's a word cloud for this very blog.



Here's a better one, the Ulster economic transition task force report to the county executive.



Cool? Absolutely. But, really, what possible use can you get out of this?