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.

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.

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!

Thanks, Jason, for making a fascinating cloud.

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!

It was a hit.

The primary goal of these personal visualizations was to facilitate the formation of new collaborative research teams on the basis of shared interest. By making interests mutually visible when people meet each other for the first time, these “name tag clouds” can identify areas of overlap, complementary expertise, and opportunities for potential collaboration — all in a brief glance. They also serve as conversational props that ease the introduction process: the clouds present conversants a rich set of topics for inquiry.

Looking around the room at any given time I witnessed circles of intellectual elites huddled intimately together, pointing playfully at one another’s clouds. Lera Boroditsky said that virtually every conversation she was in was about the cloud or referred to it.

At right: Dan Jurafsky, John Perry & Tom Wasow chat it up at the cocktail party with their clouds around their necks.

I saw some of the brightest minds in the world with child-like grins and heads tilted navel-ward to see the constellation of words and concepts that others were seeing: the alphabetic poetry of their lives scrawled across their hearts, as it were.

Here is my own name tag from the event. As far as I know, this is the first application of tag clouds in a face-to-face community.

I got a lot of good feedback from the participants. In general people were impressed by how representative the clouds were.

The most common request was the wish to see a time-lapse animation of how the cloud visualization of one’s research interests evolves over the span of a career. Jeremy Bailenson suggested that color could be used to represent the time dimension even on a static picture like a name tag. My latest interests would shine red hot, regardless of size. Past passions would loom large and cool.

Terry Winograd (pictured at right with Eve Clark) had one of the most valuable pieces of user-experience feedback when he told me that he needed his glasses to read peoples’ clouds. He’s far-sighted and so it does no good to just get closer. Note to self: bigger words, fewer words.

Thanks, Terry. And thanks to all of you for taking part and having fun doing it. I got such a kick out of it, I can’t even tell you.