Tag Cloud View of Bill Gates CES Keynote
Todd Bishop at Seattle P-I newspaper has published a telling tag cloud view of Bill Gates' speech at CES earlier this week. Notes Bishop:
"Putting our fancy new gizmo to work, we fed the text of Bill Gates' Sunday night Consumer Electronics Show keynote into the tag-cloud generator, and added the results to our scrolling timeline of Microsoft keywords. Here's the static view below, showing the most commonly used terms from the speech, and providing an alternative look at what the company was saying during this year's show."
Here is the result:
This is an excellent use of tag clouds! I wrote in our wrap-of Gates' speech last Sunday that Xbox was mentioned a lot - and the tag cloud clearly shows this. I wondered if Vista would be top word/phrase, and sure enough it is about equal with Windows. Other words to stand out include 'media', 'hardware' and 'video' (amongst others). One word that seems to be conspicuously absent is 'live'...
Also note the fairly big 'deliver' :-) 2007 is the year when Microsoft has to put up, or shut up.
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What if to make this tag cloud interactive? Just like Quintura does.. That would be even more visual.
Whats the top tag word for Jobs keynote? Boom?
I'm working on something similar. Take a look at
http://www.metaportaldermedienpolemik.net/rhnav_ovp/
if you're interested. It's an partly interactive prototype for a text mining application. The demo analyses the text of Austrian People's Party election program.
ReadWriteWeb is delivered to my PC through my gmail every morning. I chuckled when I read the article and Dugg it immediately.
One of the things that I really appreciate about your way of working is the strenuous efforts you make to provide all relevant references. So I read Bill Gates' key note address and I used ClearForest Gnosis
to tag cloud Gates' article and I came up with a different cloud.
I am quite sure that I learned about Gnosis from your blog? Anyhow I think the device of tag clouds, that is also a feature of deli.cio.us and my favourite feature in WordPress, is one of the best conceptual tools being explored on Web 2.0. (I inserted my delicious tag roll or tag cloud into my Blogger page, which is very much work-in-progress inuitartwebliography). I haven't yet been able to figure out how to insert it into the widgets on my two (free) Wordpress blogs. However, WordPress use of Featured Tags has been particularly kind to my 2 blogs speechless and papergirls and they actually generate reliable tag clouds with each of these Featured Tags. This will actually help me in writing articles since the tags clouds themselves become the article.
I have been using tag clouds as a thumbnail image of my own work and for complex texts.
For complicated texts like a book on Western political philosophy I prefer to generate my own using a pencil and paper. For this one of the Fraser Institute, a think tank in Canada similar to the Cato Institute in Washington, I used a cut and paste method while reading through their web site and annual reports. This is the tag cloud imageproduced in Adobe Photoshop and hosted on my Flickr account.
It is easy to pick out 'windows', 'vista', and 'xbox' but for much of the rest of the cloud, it is hard to discern relative strength of terms. Someone should modify the display of tag clouds so that the most used term(s) are in the middle and radiate outward in addition to relative size. Just a thought.
Great use of tag clouds though. Kind of like a buzzword meter.