TagCrowd

International languages

Daniel — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:47:46 +0000

After a crash course in the intricacies of the Unicode standard, I’ve introduced basic support for international languages in TagCrowd. There’s a new option to select the language for your text. This will remove the common words in that language from your text cloud.

“Basic support” currently means languages based on the Latin alphabet (i.e. most of Europe), and all accented characters are converted to plain characters. Currently supported languages include Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish.

Since this is the first international version of TagCrowd, there will certainly be some bugs. Please let us know if you find any. And if you want TagCrowd to work with your language, please send us a list of common words in your language.

Printable version

Daniel — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 08:08:24 +0000

By popular demand, I’ve added a little checkbox in the options to display your word clouds full screen. This should simplify things a bit if you’re taking screenshots or printing.

TagCrowd API in development

Daniel — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:22:47 +0000

Dear Developers,

I hear from a lot of you — almost every day, actually — asking if there’s a TagCrowd API so you can tie your own applications into our little cloud factory. As a result, I’ve started to draw up plans to implement a simple API. Please let me know what you’d like to see in terms of an interface and I’ll do my best to meet requests. If there are other similar web services out there you’d like to suggest as models, I’d love to see them too. Stay tuned for more developments.

Web scraping and other new features go live

Daniel — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:18:29 +0000

The most common feature request I used to receive was the ability to input a URL and have TagCrowd retrieve the web page text automatically. Since my development efforts are prioritized primarily by what I receive requests for, that feature went live a few months ago to much grateful thanks. I’m pretty sure it’s how most people are using TagCrowd these days.

Another feature I get a lot of requests for is a way to create clouds that only include words above a certain frequency. As of today, you can do that too.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to clean up the interface a bit, revamp the Stoplist editor and fix some outstanding bugs. As always, keep your feedback coming, good and bad.

Photos from CSCL

Daniel — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 16:24:53 +0000

Here are some images of TagCrowd being demonstrated at the International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) in New Brunswick, NJ. (Click on the photo to see the rest).

I created word cloud stickers for every presenter at the conference (all 147 of them) based on the title and abstract of the article they wrote for the conference. There just happened to be a space on everyone’s conference-provided name badge that was the perfect size for the stickers so it was easy for people to display them. I distributed the stickers throughout the conference and you could see people pointing and referring to them whenever they introduced themselves.

It was fun to instigate this at such a large scale. Next time I’ll try to work with the conference organizers directly instead of trying to distribute them all on my own. I sure met a lot of people that way, though!

At the CSCL conference

Daniel — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 14:08:26 +0000

I’m currently at the international conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning in New Brunswick demonstrating TagCrowd to researchers in this field. I’ll post some photos and updates when it’s all over. Meanwhile, I updated the Help section and am working on unicode support for all the many alphabets in use around the world.

TagCrowd in print

Daniel — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 14:12:45 +0000

The Dallas Morning News ran a full-page spread in their print edition comparing the speeches of Democratic presidential candidates announcing their candidacy. They used TagCrowd to visualize and compare the words the candidates are using most. It’s a neat use of the technology to make what Edward Tufte calls “small multiples“, small information-dense graphics that afford easy comparison.

TagCrowd has been boingboinged

Daniel — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 05:30:49 +0000

Boingboing, the eminent “directory of wonderful things”, today posted a TagCrowd-produced image of Bush’s State of the Union 2007. The tag cloud was made by Jason Griffey.

Thanks, Jason, for making a fascinating cloud.

New Release! Cloud saving goes live

Daniel — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:52:20 +0000

Now when you generate your spiffy new cloud, you get the HTML source code along with it so you can easily post it on your own web pages and blogs. The code and its rendered image are released under an Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons License, which means you are totally free to copy, distribute, display and modify your clouds as you please — as long as you give a little hat-tip to TagCrowd for making your clouds shine.

We’ve finally achieved the founding goal of this webapp: make it easy to generate and publish a word cloud using any text source.

Enjoy, and please keep the feedback coming. Thanks so much for your great ideas and praise!