BendTech

Wordle showing what people in Central Oregon are blogging about

bendblogs.com is, near as I can tell, a fairly comprehensive roundup of the blogs being published by Central Oregonians.  There’s not much rhyme or reason to it – just a big bag o’ stuff from a random parade of characters around here.  It’s fun to troll through but, geek that I am, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a way to extract a more meaningful gestalt from it – a way, perhaps, to define the High Desert Zeitgeist. (I’ll be trademarking that term, btw, so don’t go gettin’ any ideas. )

‘Turns out there’s a wonderful tool for doing just this sort of thing:  Wordle.net.  Functionally Wordle is nothing more than a “tag cloud” generator.  Feed it some text and it creates a tag cloud that illustrates the frequency of the words it finds.  Pretty simple idea really.  What makes Wordle special is that it gives you a myriad of options for how to display your tag cloud. You can customize the font, layout, and color schemes to produce something that is not just informative, but also quite beautiful.

By taking the text from bendblogs.com and massaging it a little I created the “Central Oregon Pulse” wordle.  It shows the relative popularity of the words used by our region’s bloggers for the last two days.  Grey words are common English words, while green words are uncommon ones.  Size indicates frequency, of course.

I wish I could say this led to some startling epiphanies; a realization that cucumbers and manatees are somehow critical elements of our local culture, but the distribution is about what you’d expect.  “President”, “Bend”, “Redmond”, “Inauguration”… ho hum.  I was a bit surprised to see “Homeless” in there (to the right of “People”) but with the economy the way it is, it makes sense.  The fact that “High” is so popular, but not “Desert”, has me wondering just how man pothead bloggers there are out there.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Anyhow, I thought you might find this a fun little diversion.  Wordle.net is a very cool tool – it got Honorable Mention on the list of the 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year.  (Don’t click that link unless you’ve got a good half-hour to kill watching some nifty technology.)

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