Comments on: Text Clouds: A New Form of Tag Cloud?

By: joe lamantia

joe lamantia — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:26:45 +0000

Hi Eamon. I didn’t have Grounded Theory specifically in mind while I was writing about text clouds, but that doesn’t mean there’s no connection. There are some text cloud analysis tools available, but I’ve not heard any of the authors mention grounded theory in relation.
Maybe you’ve found a good thread to follow up on
Thinking broadly, almost all of the research / discovery / insight methods current in management consulting and user experience are borrowed from disciplines like social sciences and cognitive sciences. If you look under the hood at many of these methods I think it’s apparent that GT is an important component and / or significant influencer. For example, I worked in an IT strategy and management consulting group that relied on a method directly derived from GT (thought I’m sure this escaped most of the people involved in defining it, ironically…)
And on a more technical side, some of the concepts that GT relies on (coding, categories, etc.) are present in search, indexing, and semantic tools.
What sort of connections do you see?

By: Eamon

Eamon — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:25:53 +0000

Fascinating reading. Do text clouds have anything in common with Grounded Theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory — a form of research where text is analysed so that important words identified and coding of keywords takes place. I don’t know a lot about grounded theory but it sounds like something that could benefit from text clouds or vice versa?

By: Figment Engine

Figment Engine — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:43:00 +0000

I've created a tag cloud that is animated and shows the relationships between tags based on co-occurance... check it out at Animated Tag Cloud

By: sasha

sasha — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:30:43 +0000

Check out http://www.cloudtuner.com

By: Tsu Dho Nimh

Tsu Dho Nimh — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 04:40:58 +0000

Joe -
Text clouds would be good for showing novice writers that they are not focused on what they think they are focused on, but without the mechanical “keyword density” calculations.
For example, if you are writing a product review, the product type, the name of the manufacturer, the product’s name, and some verbs and nouns relating to that the product is used for should show up prominently in the cloud.
You need to use a generator that has a stop list, of course. I’m using the generator at tagcrowd.com and it’s really nice.

By: andrew

andrew — Mon, 28 May 2007 13:02:47 +0000

i don’t really believe this kind of clouds are useful from a SEO point of view…too many unrelated links on a page
just my opinion though..

By: Arnab Ganguly

Arnab Ganguly — Mon, 21 May 2007 13:19:40 +0000

The question arises is the usability of Tag Clouds. Do they really help visitors. What does it mean to a normal visitor, how often they are clicked through.

By: Warren Apel

Warren Apel — Tue, 15 May 2007 19:46:35 +0000

I like the idea of using text clouds to display non-tag data. In this ManyEyes graph (URL below) I used font size to display the relative sizes of university endowments. I'm working on some similar data displays that show world population, etc. I think it's a great way to put lots of information in an easy-to-read but compact space. Much more data dense than a bar graph! http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/Sh3S9FsOtha6Qj-yrrjGF2-

By: joe lamantia

joe lamantia — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 01:52:34 +0000

Jonah: I love all the new businesses popping up around clouds these days — it’s encouraging to see so much entrepreneurism (?) in a new space. Good luck with snapshirt!
Greg: Nice work — I learned about ManyEyes at IDEA2006, and am glad to see people putting it to interesting and artisitic uses right away
Stewart: Could you share some of the more interesting examples of clouds from Scriptcloud that you’ve seen?

By: Jonah Keegan

Jonah Keegan — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 02:07:19 +0000

Joe, I won’t repeat the praise but great survey of the progress this communication has made. Also wanted to point you to my own small contribution to tag/text/word clouding. Not the deepest example of the meme, but not the shallowest either I think. )
http://snapshirts.com/