Latimes.com borrowed another feature from the blogosphere with its coverage of President Bush’s State of the Union address.
The Times’ Eric Ulken (a former OJR staffer) constructed a keyword cloud using the 50 most frequently used words in Bush’s 2006 and 2002 speeches. The clouds, which give more visual weight to more frequently used words, allow readers to get a quick visual impression of the speech’s content.
Ulken used an online cloud generator to start, then narrowed that list to the top 50 words to build his custom clouds. “If I were a programmer, I’d have written a script to do this. Instead I used Excel to compute the point sizes and alphabetize the list,” Ulken wrote.
Clouds are often found on sites that make heavy use of tagging, such as Flickr. But the principle works on any leaden block of text that needs visual punch to grab readers online. As Ulken and the Times have shown.
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