FeedVisan interactive tagcloud for your feeds

Welcome to your personal FeedVis page!

Bookmark this page; every time you return, your feed data will be updated.

FeedVis is now in private beta

Due to the unexpected amount of interest FeedVis has recieved, I'm limiting account creation. FeedVis is a spare-time project for me, and I'm short on free time. If you want an account, you've still got two options:

  1. I'll accept a limited number of email requests to establish accounts here, or
  2. The source code for FeedVis is freely available; you can install and run it on your server (this also lets you customize stopwords).

Other people's feeds:

Ok, what's this thing do?

FeedVis is like most word cloud generators, but with some extra goodness:

  • You don't just get one lump o' words: you can make tagclouds from subsets of your feeds, selecting by blog, time, or both. You can then compare those clouds to ones from other subsets; the animation makes it easy to see differences.
  • Any time you're interested in a word, you can click for more information, including summaries and links to posts that use it.

Most of what FeedVis does is based on two numbers for each word:

  • The first is frequency. Frequency says how many times a word is used per 1000 words. If you hover over a word, you'll see its frequency to the left of the frequency change value.
  • The second is frequency change. Often, a word will be more (or less) popular than usual in a certain time period (for instance, "election" in early November). Frequency change measures that difference as a percentage: greener words are unusually popular; redder words are the opposite.

FAQ

Why are all the posts clustered toward the right? Where are the older posts?
Feeds only supply their last 20 or so posts; if they post frequently, that may only go back a few days. Don't worry, though; FeedVis saves the old posts, so over the next month the list will gradually fill out.
What's OPML?
OPML is a file format that can hold lists of feeds. When you export feeds in your feedreader, it gives you OPML.
The words are too small.
Use ctrl+mouse-scroll-wheel to zoom in or out. (You can even run the animation from any zoom level.)
Why does it take so long to update feeds?
First, it takes some time to actually request and receive the rss/atom data from each blog. Then it takes a while to do the keyword extraction. I'm sure both these can be improved; grab the code have at it.
Can I delete an account?
No. You can just make another one, though.
What timezone does FeedVis use?
Yours. When you view the posts-per-day chart in Helsinki, each day starts at midnight and ends at 11:59 pm Helsinki time.
Can I use a custom set of stopwords?
Not now, but that's a planned feature.
Can I get the raw feed data out of my account?
Yes. Everything is stored in two serialized php arrays, located at http://jasonpriem.com/feedvis/accounts/your-account-name.
How permanent is FeedVis?
Not very. Since I've gotten such good response, I'll be maintaining FeedVis through 2009.

FeedVis is loading and analyzing your feeds; this takes 1-3 minutes.an animated loading graphic

edublogs-demo (next update in 5 hours) Posts per day:

days in sample:

Select a period from the chart.

filter by blog:(all)