Saturday, November 1, 2008

Dynamic tag cloud in silverlight with colour

The first version started to show the relationships, adding some simple colour coding makes the co-occurance more obvious and starts to show the themes of a blog:






I've added the ability to use other RSS feeds, however there are some security issues that mean for lots of feeds this code will just fall over..

Two feeds that work apart from mine are:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/PolymathProgrammer?format=xml
http://feeds.feedburner.com/programmableweb
see if you can work out their topics by the tag cloud!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey thanks for the mention! As far as I can tell, the clusters are based on proximity mention (I made up that phrase). The closer 2 labels (or tags) are mentioned together (like on the same post), the closer they are on the tag cloud.

I love the way the tags gradually find their way around in the cloud to be with their "own kind". Hahaha...

Anonymous said...

how many colours being used (I'm colour blind and it's not obvious to me) and how are the colours selected? Have you looked at wordle? [http://www.wordle.net/] it applies some really nice typography to word occurrence maps

fe said...

@Vincent - yep thats about the summary of how it works - though there I will post a fuller description and code once I get it working fully. (generally each word attracts or repels other words based on co-occurance)

fe said...

@Anonymous: colours are random at the moment - it allocates colours on the basis of the most occurring terms (the top most term get a random color and connected terms get the same colour). however I want to make the final version more nuanced - allowing terms to "bleed" colours from multiple co-occurances..

I had not seen wordle - its very pretty, a nice example of typography! I'll see if I can get closer to their level of elegance!