The Wordle According to AppsLab

By Jake • September 5th, 2008 • 7 Comments

Earlier this year, a friend of the ‘Lab, let’s call him Jim, asked me to open up email subscriptions for this little blog so he could consume his AppsLab goodness by email.

Through Jim’s crusading, we now have 17 subscribers by email. I think each of you should thank Jim with flowers or chocolates.

Anyway, Jim and I keep up by email (natch), and he sent me the Wordle for appslab.com before I left on staycation. Wordle creates a word-cloud based on the URL you give it. Billy also covered it here. Jim mentioned that it was a bit addictive, which I can confirm. So, if you head over to try it out, make sure you have some time to kill.

I love data visualizations, and it’s Friday. So here’s the Wordle for appslab.com as of August 28-ish. See you guys on Monday. It’s almost like I was gone at all.


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  • http://blogs.oracle.com/xmlpublisher Tim

    It is a terrible time waster :0)
    I ran it for my blog a while back, just ran it again
    http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/165056/OracleBIP

    Did not get what I expected – Product, Market, Sales? Cant be a blog about BI Publisher or reporting. Then realized that several of my recent posts have had XML data pasted into them with repeating elements such as PRODUCT, MARKET, etc – hence the funky results.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Data visualizations rule. It would be even cooler to run it against your entire history of blogging for a more complete view of your content.

  • http://jimpix.co.uk/ Jim

    Wow, my name on the AppsLab blog! It's a really great tool – it's amazing how clever programmers are. I had a go for my site:
    http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/166352/jimpix

    Couldn't work out why “Tidsdale” was so prominent, until I remembered that I had quoted a Mark Steel article about the Olypmics, which is being pulled from the RSS.

    Interesting that you have about 800 people subscribed to your RSS feed, but only 17 on email. On my teeny tiny site, I have 130 subscribed, and 108 are on email. I think it just shows that your readers are a tech savy group of web users, while people who use ecards and end up on my site aren't as likely to be into RSS etc. since they're sending ecards in the first place, which are soooo not web 2.0!

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Hey, thanks for the tip on Wordle, cool stuff.

    We have a strange demographic of subscribers. Like you, I would have expected more email subscribers. I think maybe it's not obvious enough, being below the fold and all, still 17 is way lower than I thought. We have about 200 subscribers who use Google Reader; I know this thanks to a Greasemonkey script. Again, this is lower than I expected.

    So, the real question is how are these people reading? I know a few people use Bloglines, and I guess I could check the stats more closely. Still a mystery to me.

  • http://davidhaimes.wordpress.com David Haimes

    So I did my blog and got – Oracle-See-Thumbs-People !

    http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/183608/Thumbs

    I have about 75 email subscribers, I think I have around three hundred in RSS. What that means I don't know, but email is certainly a choice people want so who am I to argue. One little secret – I subscribe to my own blog via email, then when the mail hits my inbox I give it a proof red and edit if necessary. It's that email as a to do list syndrome again…

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Subscriptions are weird. They fluctuate for no apparent reason. I was surprised we have so few emails subs. Oddly, we only have 200-ish using Reader. I think Bloglines is the preferred reader, but I've no idea why. Maybe Matt or Dan can shed some light there.

    I'm constantly using email as a reminder system, calling my voicemail and leaving notes a la Jott. That's one killer feature that I can't live without.

    I see you don't proof “red” your comments on other people's blogs :)