“And is more than just seeing tags change in size or color; when you mouse over one, it gives a measure of your use of a word compare to the aggregated whole:”

You probably already noticed this, but you can also click on the word; doing so gives you another tagcloud of the word’s forms (“education”, “educating”, and so on; hover over the word to see it); more importantly, though, it gives you a list of posts from the current sample that use the word, with excerpts and links. I think this is key–without a way to actually click through to the content, it’s just pretty pictures.

Keep me updated with how running it on your own server is working. I designed FeedVis to be portable–it stores its data in text files, so there’s no database to set up, and (as you mention) it reads any opml you give it. However, I admit I haven’ t tested the installation process very thoroughly. If you run into any trouble, I’ll be glad to help.