The geoblogosphere is abuzz this weekend thanks to a post from Brian Romans, showing the most popular words used in a paper he has published. Since then, almost every other website of note in the geoblogosphere has posted similar entries on papers they’ve written or books they have or will soon publish.
I decided to go a slightly different route. I exported the database of the Geology News website, stripped out all the html and decided to run a query through the TagCrowd website on every single post we’ve done here at Geology News. All 319 of them.
The results are interesting. You can definitely see what topics are the most popular here, as well as the source of most of our news items. (If you’re truly interested in my own thesis, you can scroll down and read what words are most popular there as well).
Other Tag Cloud Posts in the Geoblogosphere:
All of My Faults Are Stress Related
Clastic Detritus
Dinochick Blogs
Green Gabbro
Harmonic Tremors
Highly Allochthonous
Looking for Detachment
The Lost Geologist
Lounge of the Lab Lemming
Magma Cum Laude
NOVA Geoblog
My own tag cloud for my thesis project and a poster I did at the GSA conference in 2007 relating to diatoms and Lake Tecopa.
Geology Picture of the Day - Ash Cloud at Kilauea
Live!
African Dust Cloud Crosses Atlantic
Geology Picture of the Day - Chaitén Eruption
Extra Hands?
I tried to get it to do my whole website, but somehow wasn’t adept at the techno-whatever needed.
What’s “castle”?
Yeah, I’m not sure how easy it would be to do with blogspot. I assume they have a way to export all your blog data? Anyway, I basically did the same thing with the software used to run my blog. It’s not too difficult, but it can be a laborious process.
As far as “Castle” in my tag cloud, I should have explained that! We were dealing with a formation unofficially named “Castle in the Clay.” It’s named that, because some intrepid miners in the past has carved out little houses in the clay units, with actual benches and pseudo-tables for cooking surfaces. There was a framed door, as well as windows. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to locate any photos of this area on my computer. I’ll have to dig through my external drive when I get back home.
The little houses sound interesting - and photos would be great to see whenever you can find them, have time, etc. Also - if there are any stories that go with them…
You run your own copy of WordPress, don’t you? I actually wrote a plugin that will automatically generate your blog’s text cloud a while back (though, um, it’s currently choking on my accumulated archives - I should probably optimize the code).
Yeah, I am running WordPress in the background on this blog. I love it. :) But your plugin sounds quite interesting. It sounds like it would be a great sort of “live tagging” plugin showing what sorts of words are currently the most popular on the website. I did have to exclude a lot of words when TagClouds parsed my website. Maybe your plugin is better? Seriously, bring it! :)
Right now it parses the whole blog, but it wouldn’t be too much extra work to modify it to use just the most recent posts. The default word exclusion list might or might not be better than what TagCrowd uses.
Something to play with once I’m done thesising :)