In my everyday technology browsing I see a fair number of interesting tools, sites, ideas, that come my way via RSS, twitter, etc. A lot of them I give a quick look, say “Hmm”, tag ’em, and move on.

Besides almost every post of unbelievable wizardry and in depth explanation of Tony Hirst, not often are there things that just knock me over breathless. Maybe I have been drinking the Web 2.0 Koolaid for too long.

I had one of those “wow” moments tonight with something that came out of the blue. I’ll share it all, and am curious if my excitement is misplaced or not (would not be the first time)

Like many others, I have had my “Wordle Moment” which is another example of this phenomena. The stunning visualization effects of making word clouds out of plain text is nothing short of astounding, and it not your grandfather’s tag cloud.

Beyond a few plays with it like many people do, it’s been more fun than function (nothing wrong). I did use it just yesterday to create a graphic banner for a new site related to tagging. But I thought Wordle took it up a notch when I saw how you could have it generate a cloud based on an RSS feed:

The thing tht caught my eye my there was the prominence of “Tigger” over “Eyeore” because in that week I had one post about these characters and two more piggy pack posts echoing.

But that was also the last time I ventured down to Pooh Corner in this blog, which prompted my to ponder in that post:

The uber nifty Wordle tag cloud generator now can take any URL that has an RSS feed and generate one of those lovely word maps of content.

Here is what the latest blabber from CogDogBlog has in it- heavily weighted by my serious examination of the Pooh- Eeyore Debate.

What would be cool is to grab a time series of these to see how word use changes over time.

And way down in the comments, Jason Priem mentioned he was working on some code to generate visualizations of tag clouds over time.