American in Spain

Cloudy Debate

May 2, 2007

I just found one of the more clever usages I've seen of a tag cloud. A tag cloud is a new form of histogram chart where words or "tags" that appear more often are shown in a larger font. The first one I ever saw was on Flickr a year or two ago, but they've since become quite popular. I even have one right here on my blog for my post topics (see "Topic Cloud" left sidebar). Check out the following article:

Pollster.com: Tag Clouds for the Democratic Debate

It's about the word frequency in the speech of the presidential candidates during the first Democratic debate last week. It's a similar analysis to my earlier post about Bush Speech Word Frequency.

Here are two quick examples to pique your interest:

Obama tags

Clinton tags

Again, you can see them for all the candidates on pollster.com.

I found the site via this interesting blog about charts that I might subscribe to.