More cool stuff

You may recall that a few weeks ago, during Bush's State of the Union, I started playing around with "tag clouds."

For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, tag clouds basically look at the recent content on your site and display it, visually, based on the frequency with which key words are used. Words used more often are larger, words used less often, smaller. In my post, I used the technology to take a look at Bush's State of the Union addresses since he took office, in order to get a sense of what key words he was most interested in citing in his speeches.

Anyway, I was playing with it on this site, and got the idea that it might be interesting to compare what words/issues we talk about the most here versus other top progressive blogs - sort of a not totally scientific zeitgeist of what the blogs are thinking, as it were. So, I've set up a comparison at the bottom of the AMERICAblog home page - scroll all the way down, you'll see it - of live tag clouds from 9 of the top progressive political blogs. I just set it up this afternoon, so it only reflects the last 6 or 8 posts or so, but eventually it will display the words most used during the past 3 days, larger words used more often, etc. It will update several times a day, hopefully. I'm not sure what this will tell us, if anything, but it could be interesting. So check it out.

I've grabbed a screen capture of the tag cloud set-up earlier today, it looks like this.