Tag Cloud of Connect.BarcodeofLife.net

Here is a tag cloud I generated of all of the activity on Connect.BarcodeofLife.net since launch:

There are many ways to generate a tag cloud. To create this one, I used the free online tools TagCrowd.com and Google Reader. First, I subscribed to the Latest Activity feed for the network in Google Reader. I scrolled all the way to the bottom (which took a while) in order to copy all of the activity dating back to the network's inception. I then pasted this text into TagCrowd and generated a tag cloud.

Well almost.

One thing that's nice about TagCrowd over other tag cloud generators out there is that you can create a custom stoplist on the spot to remove unwanted words. This was easy to do. Once I generated a tag cloud of my most commonly occurring words, I simply copied those into my stoplist and deleted out the words I wanted to retain for my cloud. This gave me a stoplist with common redundant phrases that would be eliminated from my tag cloud, such as these:

add
activity
ago
checked
colleagues

Then I ran my visualizer a few more times, refining my stoplist until I had a solid cloud of relevant words, which as you can see ended up largely being the names of the most active members on Connect.

How many of you have created tagclouds of your data? Its a great way to waste a few minutes and it can sometimes provide interesting insights. If anyone does try creating a barcode-related tag cloud using TagCrowd (or another cloud generator), please post your results to this blog and show us what you came up with.