Wordle

My coworker Alex (I'll get a link out here for him soon now that his blog is public - I haven't sent the address home yet) sent me a link to Wordle and a word cloud he made from my blog. I've looked at Wordle before and there's a tag cloud somewhere on the blog in the past, but it's always fun to rerun those things to see if it looks different than the last time.

Here's the image Alex generated. I looked at it for a while and decided it only really captured the last month of my blog. It looks like I'm obsessed with Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, instead of obsessed with alcohol, sex, and bicycling, which is really the case.


So I ran it again trying to tag the last 100 posts by using a parameterized blogger url. This seemed a little more accurate. I do talk a lot about Eryn. I do put a lot of photos and pictures on my blog. But Christmas is limited to a single month. And surgery was the topic du jour for December, but otherwise it's not a consistent blog topic. And Sparky and Hannigan were one-post topics. So clearly, this wasn't capturing the essence of my blog either.


Wordle is cool. It's just not accurate. Fortunately, I remembered that Technorati does a word cloud that focuses on your tags, not your words from the last # posts. This seems more accurate, although less aesthetically pleasing. I'm willing to believe that bicycling, geocaching, friends, humor, eryn, memes and "postpourri" occupy quite a bit of my writing. I'm disappointed "Mean Mr. Mustard's Sister" doesn't make the cut.