And Now For Something Completely Different 8: Summarising Blogs With Wordle

Reading blogs is fun, but find new ones that you'll enjoy can be time consuming. Fortunately, there's a really useful tool to simplify the process: Wordle.[1] Just give it a URL or a block of text, and you get out a 'word cloud' that helpfully illustrates the frequency with which words are used.[2] This can give a useful flavor of what a blog is about! For example, entering the URL of this blog give the following:

'Synthesis' and 'reaction' are the most abundant words, and I think this gives a pretty good idea of what you'll find here on a typical day.If we subject Chemjobber to the same treatment we get the following (you can changes the colours easily):

Clearly, Chemjobber mostly writes about chemicals and percentages! Finally, I thought I'd subject Just Like Cooking to the same, rigorous analysis:

I'm not sure sure what to make of this one; it appears that the most common word recently used by See Arr Oh on his blog is 'really'![3] I wonder how this thing would cope with actual papers?

1. I got this idea by reading this post from Chemically Cultured this morning.

2. Apparently really common words like 'the', 'and' and  'a' are omitted to make things more interesting!

3. I think the program works by just pulling your RSS feed, so it only 'analyses' the most recent posts on a blog.