TagCrowd

By popular demand, I’ve added a little checkbox in the options to display your word clouds full screen. This should simplify things a bit if you’re taking screenshots or printing.

Dear Developers,

I hear from a lot of you — almost every day, actually — asking if there’s a TagCrowd API so you can tie your own applications into our little cloud factory. As a result, I’ve started to draw up plans to implement a simple API. Please let me know what you’d like to see in terms of an interface and I’ll do my best to meet requests. If there are other similar web services out there you’d like to suggest as models, I’d love to see them too. Stay tuned for more developments.

The most common feature request I used to receive was the ability to input a URL and have TagCrowd retrieve the web page text automatically. Since my development efforts are prioritized primarily by what I receive requests for, that feature went live a few months ago to much grateful thanks. I’m pretty sure it’s how most people are using TagCrowd these days.

Another feature I get a lot of requests for is a way to create clouds that only include words above a certain frequency. As of today, you can do that too.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to clean up the interface a bit, revamp the Stoplist editor and fix some outstanding bugs. As always, keep your feedback coming, good and bad.

Here are some images of TagCrowd being demonstrated at the International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) in New Brunswick, NJ. (Click on the photo to see the rest).

I created word cloud stickers for every presenter at the conference (all 147 of them) based on the title and abstract of the article they wrote for the conference. There just happened to be a space on everyone’s conference-provided name badge that was the perfect size for the stickers so it was easy for people to display them. I distributed the stickers throughout the conference and you could see people pointing and referring to them whenever they introduced themselves.

It was fun to instigate this at such a large scale. Next time I’ll try to work with the conference organizers directly instead of trying to distribute them all on my own. I sure met a lot of people that way, though!

I’m currently at the international conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning in New Brunswick demonstrating TagCrowd to researchers in this field. I’ll post some photos and updates when it’s all over. Meanwhile, I updated the Help section and am working on unicode support for all the many alphabets in use around the world.

Thanks to a bug report from Jason, which led me on a short development spree, you can now embed the code for your tag clouds into blog posts and other content-management systems. If you encounter any problems, please let me know what platform you’re using and I’ll jump on a solution.

Now when you generate your spiffy new cloud, you get the HTML source code along with it so you can easily post it on your own web pages and blogs. The code and its rendered image are released under an Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons License, which means you are totally free to copy, distribute, display and modify your clouds as you please — as long as you give a little hat-tip to TagCrowd for making your clouds shine.

We’ve finally achieved the founding goal of this webapp: make it easy to generate and publish a word cloud using any text source.

Enjoy, and please keep the feedback coming. Thanks so much for your great ideas and praise!

Many many bug-fixes have gone live. Your tag clouds are more accurate than ever and the interface has been tweaked to address many usability issues. Clouds away!

I’ve been showing TagCrowd around to friends and colleagues lately (easy user testing). It’s fun to watch people get into playing with it, seeking out ever-more interesting texts, speeches or poetry to visualize and compare. It made me realize that TagCrowd needs a photo gallery of clouds, each linking to its source text.

I find that newcomers to the tag cloud are enamored by its gestalt typographic aesthetic more than anything else.

It’s beautiful information.

More than a few people have said they want a tag cloud print to hang on their walls as cybermodern art. Some want t-shirts with visualizations of their resumes. Roy Pea and I spoke yesterday about printing tag clouds on name tags for a September gathering of researchers.

Imagine walking around with a tag cloud dangling from your neck, meeting people and glancing down at their name tags to see the vocabulary of their interests and expertise. In a sense, you can see in that glance how to speak their language. Know to call a shoe a shoe. And know to ask about their interest in dolphin language or C++ compilers or Japanese architecture.

Roy always reminds me to ask, What’s missing from the model? For instance, what word should be in my tag cloud that isn’t? After all, it does not adequately sum up my life to run my CV through the TagCrowd shreddder — monotonous and academic as it may be. But it’s a start.

Cory Doctorow’s seven obstacles to meta-utopia guarantee we will never have perfect metadata. But we will have plenty of rough yet reliable approximations.

A tag cloud made from a CV may not be the most empirically rigorous way of assessing someone’s research interests, even a narrow band of them. But it’s a great approximation for being so quick and easy. A hand drawn sketch instead of a photograph; the tag cloud is information impressionism: what it lacks in exactitude, it makes up for with good looks.

Fuzzy information can be useful too, as Fred Turner told me today. You can learn a lot from a sketch.

Since I now apparently have a growing user community (all ten of you!), I decided to add an easy feedback form for reporting bugs, making feature requests, declaring your undying love, etc.

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