… but I never know how to express them.
Fortunately, I have Wordle to help me.
The above graphic represents my tweets.
What’s that you say? “What’s a tweet?” A tweet is something I twittered. It’s a short one-liner I presented to the world through twitter. And the above “word cloud” represents all the words I used in all my tweets since I started using it in October 2007. The more common the word, the bigger it’s representation. Common words like the, and, a and wtf are removed for clarity.
Here’s how I did it:
- I took all the words in all the tweets I’ve done so far on twitter
- I massaged them a bit with vi and command line text tools (to make it all lower case, get rid of URLs and HTML, and get rid of “new blog post”)
- I submitted the resulting text to Wordle
- I got back a word cloud summarizing all of my tweets. Made the graphic and the PDF.
- (I found Wordle through Jonathan Coulton, who found it through Brad Sucks.)
Yeah, I guess I have some kind of twitter-crush on Dave2 (blogography). Whatever. I also see absurdist and snackiepoo and gally, avitable, watchdog, jestertunes, mr_shiny and martymankins. All these people are on twitter and get replies or messages from me. You can join twitter with us and get in on the fun.
This got me thinking - what do my post titles look like? (what do I write about?) What about all my posts? (How do I write about them?) What about the comments? (What do YOU write about?) I didn’t have to wonder long - I just exported my comments, titles and posts from my WordPress blog’s database, did the same massaging and then made myself some graphics.
whall.org post titles Wordle:
whall.org posts Wordle:
whall.org comments Wordle:
I especially like the java interface where you can change the font, layout and color scheme and it renders in real-time. Very slick! Nice job, Jonathan Feinberg!
And the final result? If I mash up all the posts, post titles, comments and tweets? I get a decent summary of my online presence:
Yup. It says it right there - “good blog.”
