Green Twit Clouds

7/29/08 – Currently, Twitter is not accepting connections from Yahoo Pipes so my second tag cloud is not working. The Yahoo Pipes blog states that they are currently working with Twitter to resolve this issue.

David Wescott’s comment on my post Green Twitter – Aggregating the Feeds of Green Twits suggested that we create tag clouds from the RSS feeds of people discussing the environment on twitter and from the RSS feeds from the same individual’s blog postings. I thought about the best way to do this for a couple of days and today created the tag clouds.

I located a site called Make Cloud, which specializes in creating a tag cloud from RSS feeds and then provides code so you can embed the cloud on your blog or website. Once I tested this with a standard feed, I headed to Yahoo Pipes to work on the aggregation.

Since David had already aggregated the twitter feeds with Yahoo Pipes, I thought creating a cloud from that feed would be a simple part of the process; Just grab the RSS feed, input it on Make Cloud and then grab the embedding code. When I made the cloud, however, I noticed that the most used tags were the twitter usernames of the individuals posting most frequently. The usernames would show me who was posting often but would not give me an indication of the topics being discussed.

I headed back to Yahoo Pipes and tried to figure out how to remove the twitter usernames. I am by no means proficient with Yahoo Pipes and usually look at what others have created and shared and then clone and modify the work. I wasn’t sure how to remove the twitter usernames so I did a search on ‘twitter’ for other pipes using twitter for data. The 2nd one that I located used a regex expression to remove the usernames. I copied the expression and then cloned David’s feed since I was going to need to add this piece of code to the pipe. The cloned feed is located here.

I then created an aggregated feed from the RSS feeds of Green Blogs that I compiled for my Green Twitter article.

I put both feeds through Make Cloud and created tag clouds in order to compare the tags for the Green Blog feeds vs. the Green Twitter feeds. The clouds are listed below.

Blog:

Twitter:

There is quite a difference between the clouds. The cloud for Green Blog feeds is primarily about environmental issues wheareas the cloud for Green Twitter feeds contains tags for a variety of topics. The second cloud, however, gives insight into the personalities of the tweeters interested in the environment. I suppose a complete view of issues and personalities would come from aggregating both of the pipes and then creating a tag cloud from the the single aggregated feed.

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