November 27th, 2010
First and Last and Wordle
Lately I’ve been playing around with Wordle. It takes a piece of writing and pulls out the most common words in a piece of writing and applies some algorithmic magic to generate a word cloud, a bit like the tag cloud I keep at the bottom of this site.
It’s better-randomized, though, and more “cloud”-like. Sometimes its output takes a little finessing, but I’m a little bit fascinated with the way it seems to condense stories into important flashes of impression. Given First and Last and Always, for example, it almost seems to take a life of its own.