As if things weren’t already fast-paced and noisy enough, the rise of Twitter and similar tools over the past year or so has increased the pace of and the volume of online chatter.
I have blogged about the growth of search tools that index the social Web.
Even though these may do a better job than Google of taking a deep dive into discussion threads, it is still easy to get lost in a sea of search engine results .
You may be interested to know there are tools that take a visual approach to help you make sense of the online content and buzz (or just entertain). They range from utilities in fee-based platforms like Cision and Radian6 to free, Web-based services. Some show rising buzz topics dancing across (or down) the screen through animation, and others generate tag and word clouds.
It is a fascinating topic, and it can be great fun to play around with some of these.
The following is a quick tour of the sites that I have run across. I will be exploring this topic further in upcoming posts.
Digg Labs
Digg Labs offers a variety of graphical applications that show buzz happening in real time; as people Digg stories and the stories rise in ranking, you can see the trajectories unfold.
Gleaning Insight from Clouds
Word clouds provide a great way to get a quick take of which words and phrases stand out amidst a sea of text. They can help you understand the focus of a blog, or which words are used most often in association with a brand.
Wordle creates word art for your blog, website or presentations. It
accepts text and generates a corresponding word cloud, which you can
save as a graphics file. I have found that is is a great tool
for analyzing word usage – you can enter article text, for example, and see
which words jump out in association with a topic or brand.
I first read about this application (developed by IBM Watson research lab) last year in the NY Times. It lets users upload tabular or textual data and generates different types of visualizations. Many Eyes looks like it has great promise but can be a bit intimidating for the novice. This tutorial from the eContent blog should help.
WP-Cumulus is a tag cloud generator plugin for WordPress blogs. I first saw it on Steve Kayser’s blog and was captivated. The utility generates a shimmering, moving word cloud – as you hover your mouse cursor over it, the cloud rotates.
Twitter “Mood Ring”
Twistori (see image, above) tracks and streams those tweets that indicate feelings and emotions such as love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish. Highlight the feeling and you will see associated Tweets rise up your screen
