Does Your Blog Wordle Up?

Article
03/11/2009

My multi-talented, java-enabled yet Windows-empowered friend Alik Levin of www.practicethis.com (among other blogs) subjected my blog to the machinations of www.wordle.net. Wordle creates "word clouds".

Another friend, Bob "Roudy Bob" Roudebush, Windows MVP & mild-mannered Director of Solutions Engineering at Double-Take by day, elsewise nocturnal denizen of the Internet, recently cited Wordle as well.

Stand back! We may be on the verge of critical mass...

Word Clouds
So what's Wordle? From the Wordle home page:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

The Wordle gallery for this java app is fascinating, where I found Wordle's transmogrifications for text ranging from Genesis to the classic boilerplate Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...

Alik's Thesis: Wordle is a Measure of Focus
Alik's intriguing thesis is that Wordle can be used to visually demonstrate the focus—or lack thereof—of a web site or blog.

Wordling My Blog
Is he right? As a biochemist in a former life & in my current role as a high-performance engineer, I love to experiment.

My blog's description is:

Jimmy May, Aspiring Geek: SQL Server Performance, Best Practices, & Productivity
News you can use on implementation of the elusive sqlservr.exe /faster switch, personal effectiveness, etc.

Here's what Wordle did with my blog:

The conclusion:

Archimedes invents electricity.

In spite of my undisciplined digressions, ADD moments, gratuitous-sounding yet sincere characterizations, & off-topic rants, I've apparently been able to finagle my way back to my central themes.

<ADD>Speaking of ADD moments, my therapist will be thrilled to learn that I've been validated by a software application.</ADD>

Wordling a White Paper
Here's a Wordle of the latest-&-greatest draft of the white paper I've written for SQL CAT with Denny Lee on disk partition alignment.

Again, Eureka! (Don't hold your breath, but stay tuned for the DPA white paper...)

Other Wordles
Alik Wordled other blogs:

A Toy? Or More?
Is Wordle just a toy, or can it be an effective tool to analyze the focus of one's work?