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 on indefinate hiatus

Due to the unexpected amount of interest FeedVis has recieved, I've accumulated more accounts than I can take care of and secure; as a spare-time, learning project, FeedVis was never designed to scale very well.

So, I'm closing out all the accounts accept the demo one (based on Scott McLeod's list of top 50 education blogs). If this is a problem for anyone, feel free to contact me and I'll try to help you set up FeedVis on your own server, or maybe set up a special account for you on mine. Thanks so much to everyone for their comments and suggestions.

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.
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?
If you run this on your own server, just edit stopwords.txt
Can I get the raw feed data out of old 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 at all. I tried hard to keep all the accounts working, but the underlaying architecture was just never really meant to scale the level of demand I got. If your account data is important to you, though, contact me and we'll get it out in a format you can use.

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

edublogs-demo (next update in 21 hours) Posts per day:

days in sample:

Select a period from the chart.

filter by blog:(all)