Update: I’ve stopped active development on FeedVis. It was a learning project, and after spending some time trying to do some refactoring, I’ve decided that it’s just too ugly to fix. You’re still welcome to download the code and email me with minor problems, but I won’t be fixing anything significant from here out.
FeedVis is an interactive tagcloud for groups of rss feeds. This is the development page; here’s the demo page.
I liked the idea of making a word cloud to examine a group of feeds; however, though there were several options, I wanted more. A plain tagcloud from a feed is static: all the words happen now. Conversations change, and I wanted to see that. I wanted more context, too–information about who was using the words, and how. Hence, FeedVis. It lets you compare tagclouds from various authors and times, as well as giving you access to the posts that actually use the words.
Download
The code for Feedvis is on github. There’s no database to set up, so installation is generally pretty easy (though note that it requires at least PHP 5.2). If you run into trouble, feel free to drop me a line.
Reviews
Several fine Internet publications have posted about FeedVis:
ReadWriteWeb
Information Aesthetics
OPML News
RSS4Lib
Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media
Knowbodies
e-clippings
TextmodeInfobib (deutsche)
Outils Froids (français)
Genbeta (español )
Topify
Write to Reply
CogDogBlog
technologyscan.com
Thanks to
Chirag Mehta for the idea of combining timeline and tagcloud, Richard Heyes for his php port of the Porter Stemming Algorithm, John Resig and the developers of the amazing jQuery library, Paul Bakaus and Brandon Aaron for their jQuery dropshadow plugin, Jorn Zaefferer for his jQuery tooltip plugin, and Ariel Flesler for the jQuery.ScrollTo plugin. And if I left anyone out, let me know.
