Wordle: Capture your blog in a single picture

Wordle is an interesting little web-based toy that creates a "word cloud" from text you provide. Words that appear more often in the text appear larger in the finished cloud.

One of the most interesting ways to use this toy, is to provide a blog or feed as the form of input. For example, the following word cloud was created using the feed from this blog :

Picture from Wordle

As you can tell from the word cloud, I've been doing a lot of Batman related posts recently. For someone like me, who uses this blog for a variety of things, it's interesting to see some reoccurring themes.

A bleaker example of a word cloud can be seen from this word-cloud I created using the BBC Front-Page News feed:

It could be fun to use this with your twitter feeds, to find out what people are tweeting about. Or with Facebook status updates. You could output your music as text from iTunes and then create a word cloud to represent your musical taste.

Make your own word cloud using Wordle and link to it in the comments.

Twitter: Stalk Me From Anywhere

I have recently decided to investigate the concept of "micro-blogging". It is basically a type of blogging, that instead of writing a full article, I simply update my current thoughts or actions into a phrase which is 160 characters or less. This mico-post is then published and can be viewed by all. Yes, you're right - it's the online equivalent of broadcasting a text message to all my friends - Blogging for the MTV generation, one might say.

Using website Twitter , I can now alert you, dear reader, of my current thoughts and actions as and when they happen. It's quite appealing as sometimes I am too busy (read: can't be bothered) typing up a full blog entry. Another amusing, and perhaps sinister, aspect is the e-stalking potential. By simply accessing the Internet, you can check where I am and what I'm doing (assuming, I've decided to broadcast the information). In fact, the action of subscribing to a persons Twitter feed is known as "following" which further fuels the fire.

So, if you'd like to e-stalk me, or just keen to know what I'm thinking, if you look to the right of this post you can see my latest "tweet" updates. Or, why not sign-up to Twitter as well and we can make sweet tweets together.