Armchair Theorist

The latest Internet toy of the moment is Wordle, a fantastic time waster tool which creates pretty word clouds based on text you provide. It can also generate the clouds based on a RSS feed, or even your del.icio.us user name!

Here is the word cloud for this blog, using my current RSS feed (click on the image to see a larger version):

Here is another visualization Wordle created based on my plain text resume. Can you guess what exactly is it that I do from this word cloud?

Finally, here is a visualization created from my FriendFeed network. As you can see, most of the people in my network are likely Democratic supporters who like commenting about Google and people named Dave.

Wordle was created by Jonathan Feinberg, who works for IBM Research. You can start creating your own word clouds here.

Interestingly, Wordle is not the first visualization tool that emerged from IBM Research. If visualizations float your boat, do check out the equally wonderful Many Eyes tool from IBM’s Collaborative User Experience Group as well!