Make Your #Twordle!

On the drive back from TMC14, Justin Lanier, Jasmine Walker and I were discussing the various types of conversations that we have had since we began our respective journeys on Twitter.  An idea was formed!

Those of us who geek out about data and words, have been familiar for a while with the Wordle.  Wordle is a program that takes a body of text, does a word count and then creates a word cloud where the words vary in size based on the frequency in which they appear in the text.

For example, this is the Wordle for the Constitution of the United States:

This Wordle shows that the most common word in the Constitution is "States" followed by "President."

The idea was batted around that we should make Wordles from our Twitter feeds to see what kinds of things we talk about and value.

This was such a good idea that we drove faster so we could get home and do it!

Here are the step-by-step instructions on how to make your own!

Go to Twitter.com:

Click on the gear in the upper right right hand corner and go down to "Settings":

Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on 'Request Archive": (If you've done this before, the button will change to "Resend Email")

Twitter will send you an email with a link to download your archive:

In that download, there will be an Excel file with all of your tweets:

Highlight the column marked "text":

Right click and choose "Copy":

Head on over to Wordle.net:

Click on "Create Your Own":

Paste your text into the top box:

Hit "Go": (This is a Wordle made from the profile descriptions of my Twitter followers.)

You can use the program to play around with layouts, format and colors.

Do this! Make a Twordle from your Twitter feed and see what you talk about.

Here's mine:

So what do I notice? MSMathChat is a huge thing for me! The next biggest being "RT" coupled with almost half of the words on here being the handles of other users, tells me that I greatly value collaboration, sharing and conversation.

Other big ones for me are "think", "like" and "know."

What about you?  What does your say about what you value?



Bonus: Here's the Wordle for this post:

Edit: Because I couldn't stop with what was on here, since I have an addictive personality, I made Wordles for months of my blog posts.  The follow image contains the Wordles for August, September, October and June. Can you tell which is which?  What do they say about my values over time?  What do you notice?

I have my own thoughts, but I'd like to hear yours.