In mid June, 2011, I did a piece about Twitter Word Clouds. This video, and the abridged text below, takes a more general look at why word clouds, in all their glorious forms, are taking the Web graphics world be storm.
Trish: And I’m Trish Montayne. And now, we are talking about “Word Clouds”. So why do you think word clouds have become a popular way of creating graphic representations for digital media?
Eric: I think, first and foremost, it’s incredible how powerful they are – in the sense that you don’t have to put much effort into making something that winds-up being a really powerful way of showing something
Eric: If you’re using infographics, for example, you really have to put some thought into how you’re using the data to create the representation. With word clouds, the sort of – I hate to use the word algorithm, but I’m an SEO guy so I use tend to use that a lot – with them, you’re simply putting, inputting, a large amount of text and it’s coming up with a very powerful visual representation of what’s more significant in all of your related texts. So it really makes it simple from that stand-point.
And yes, once you start using, you can tweak it a bit. And that’s pretty nifty because then you can start saying “this word got in here but it’s really not very relevant, it just it happens to be a popular word in any conversation or a conversation – any written material. So just bump it out.” But yeah, it’s really easy to make these. There wasn’t any kind of software, I think 4 years ago, where you could take information and so easily turn it into a graphic.