FeedVis is a word cloud/feed visualization tool. Give it a bunch of RSS feeds (in OPML), it will digest them for you, and present a word frequency chart which you can interact with by selecting date ranges, specific blogs, or both.
I selected about 75 RSS- and library-related feeds and generated an OPML file, which I then uploaded to FeedVis. This is what the interface looks like. Across the top is a time scale — a yellow bar indicates each day in the 30-day window, with the number of posts for each day shown. Beneath that is a word cloud, showing the most common words in the collection of feeds for the selected time period (in this case, all feeds for all 30 days).
If you select a single blog, FeedVis focuses on that blog and redraws the word cloud for you with a slick AJAX effect. The size of the word shows frequency (per thousand words), as you’d expect. The color indicates recent shifts in popularity. If a word has been used more in the selected time period than overall, it shows up as green. If a word has been used less frequently in the selected time period than overall, it’s red.
You can interact with this data yourself at http://jasonpriem.com/feedvis/index.php?account=varnum. Of course, you can also create your own by exporting an OPML file from your favorite RSS reader (no more than 100 feeds can be imported at once, however).
Thanks for the nice review!
You probably noticed this, but you can also click a word to get times, excerpts, and links to all the posts that use it; hovering over the word after clicking gives you a list of versions (like ‘schools’, ‘schooling’, and so on).
If you’ve got any ideas for features, or you notice any bugs, just let me know. And don’t forget that all the source is available if you’d like to download it and run it as a standalone app on your own server.