Many of you may have stumbled over Wordle like I did some time ago. It is a nice little tool (implemented as a Java applet) that creates nice word clouds out of some arbitrary text pasted directly into the browser or provided by an URL. Since then I have found some nice, interesting and creative uses for it.
First a Wordle-cloud of our blog frontpage. The left image shows that we are currently talking a lot about projects and our approach to blogging. Compare that with the cloud from a few weeks ago where listener structures and memory management were hot topics.- The guys over at EclipseSource ran Wordle over the EclipseCon program to give a quick overview what this conference is all about.
- Daan analyzed the class naming of popular OpenSource projects and put the very interesting results on his blog.
I quickly hacked something similar together and ran it over two of our projects. The interesting thing is that you can actually get an impression what the projects are about. Let’s take a look at it:
NPA (Nano Particle Analyzer)
This seems to be a project where everything is about measuring something. We can see that there is need for calibration and that energy and data play a major role here. We can even spot a laser (try to find it!) out there which is an important part of the whole system.
Ramses
This project seems to be very abstract and generic but there are some concrete pointers to what’s going on here too. It works together with some spectrometry hardware via Genie2k, with a Delphin box and some camera. There seems to be an appointment management integrated, i18n support ready and some more obscure things like fesas.
If you have other cool ideas how to use Wordle I would be glad to hear about them.
Schneide Blog 