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Word clouds for hotel destinations

Just ran into Wordle, a funky web app that generates word clouds from text that you provide or from any RSS feeds.

We fed Wordle with some of our RSS feeds for hotel destinations. Here's the word cloud it generated for hotels in Goa

These word clouds are largely generated from hotel description text and almost give you a feel for the destination. The larger a word in the cloud, the more frequently it appeared in the text. For instance, "Beach" is the largest word in the cloud for Goa. The other destinations seem to have "hotel" as their largest word.

There's more word clouds for other destinations after the jump.

Word cloud for Mumbai hotels

Word cloud for Bangalore hotels

Word cloud for Singapore hotels

Word cloud for Bangkok hotels

Posted on Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 10:00AM by Registered CommenterHrush | Comments6 Comments

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Reader Comments (6)

Same old web stats, different packaging?
December 31, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterDhruv Chopra
Can you do anything with this to make it useful for customers?
January 2, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterCustomer
Interesting stuff. Gives you a good idea of whats the focus of a content page.
January 3, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterMumbai
Dhruv--this isn't about web stats at all. It's completely based on how often a word is mentioned in the RSS feed for the destination. The more often a word is repeated, the bigger it gets in the cloud.
January 3, 2009 | Registered CommenterHrush
Hrush, so thats exactly what I meant. An interesting visual representation of what we're otherwise used to seeing as tabular data. Tabular data would quite plainly deliver the same information - which is the word thats most often repeated (and how often it is repeated).

Word clouds have been around for some time now - and I've always marveled at their visual impact (very 'Web 2.0') but wondered about their usefulness going beyond tabular data. Perhaps we're all just bored of tabular data now, and the next release of Webtrends Ondemand will use an implementation of word clouds on their reports as a fantastic excuse to charge us the earth (and the mooon) and bill it as the next big thing in Web traffic monitoring.
January 5, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterDhruv Chopra
Wordle is awesome. But I think you're addicted.
January 5, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterDiwant Vaidya

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