Anyone else besides me love word clouds? I like them for many reasons but if they are not contrived of a set of words you put in manually, it may actually tell us something about ourselves. These of course are not scientific, but there are many API applications that will put data from parts of your online life that will automatically generate words from your own networking. Wordle is one popular one that I have posted here before but this morning I visited HubSpot’s Twitter Grader for @scottfillmer and forgot they had a word cloud for your tweets. If you haven’t checked out HubSpot, they have some really neat tools for blogs and all things online. My HubSpot word cloud went something like this.
This word cloud is specific to my Twitter posts. Funny if picked up the smilee, which I use far to often, but most of the time that is part of who I am. What fascinated me about this list is how big the word CAN’T is on my list. I think that is probably referring to other posts because I am all about the CAN so it was wild to see that in the list.
Taking a look at my Wordle which I do from time to time is a little more of an eye opener. The wordle cloud takes the text from your blog or other related feed site. I have a little twist on this wordle. I did the cloud in black and white and then went in and did a bit of personal evaluation and circled or underlined some words in red. How small have I made God on my blog? Small enough to have to use an arrow to show where it shows up on my cloud. Same thing with my wife (Deb) up near the top of my blog.
How about Christ, or Jesus? Couldn’t find them on the word cloud other than the word Christmas, amazing. Some would argue that it’s a blog, it doesn’t have to be about my wife, or Jesus, or God, or Ministry, but it is what we make it. A blog can serve many purposes and focus on many subjects. The words below are obviously what my blog has focused on recently (it takes the words from the last 10 posts I believe). I don’t think it shows a right or wrong, but a way to look at what is important on this particular blog. If my wife, or God is important for me on this blog I guess I have work to do.
Some other observations about the wordle are things I didn’t think about. The word children’s and children are pretty prominent, have no idea why, we have no kids at home and don’t really do much with kids, but there it is.
Of course you may be asking why post this anyway. Well, the focus of my blog changes from time to time. I realized the only thing that stays the same is who I am, Scott Fillmer, and that is not something I can do anything about, after all, I am me, but to evaluate and refocus on a blog once in a while is a good thing. Over the next few weeks I will have a few posts to show and explain the direction I am looking at taking my blog (it’s not to different than it is now) and hopefully I can get more personal with what is important in my life, many of which are the small words on the screen above.
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