Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Turn RSS Feeds Into Word Clouds With Stephen’s Cloud Seeder

Turn RSS Feeds Into Word Clouds With Stephen’s Cloud Seeder
By ResearchBuzz

At the end of May I made NewsDrizzle, which lets you browse various news categories as word clouds generated from RSS feeds. In addition to the word cloud, NewsDrizzle also generates a few random Web searches based on the content of the word clouds. It is absolutely not for searching — it’s more for getting a sense of something and generating Web queries for it when you know very little about it. (I note on the page that ‘It’s not so much “browsing the news” as “pogo-sticking the news”’ and I stand by that.)

Someone on LinkedIn named Stephen Albright asked me if he could customize the content used by NewsDrizzle. That seemed like a fair ask so I made Stephen’s Cloud Seeder.

This is a screenshot of Stephen's Cloud Seeder at work. At the top there is a form to enter up to 15 RSS feeds and a submit button. Underneath is a generated word cloud with lots of tech industry words in it. Underneath that are a few random Google News searches generated based on words in the word cloud. I think you'll be able to use the cloud - it's not a static image, words will pop out if you mouseover them. The random search links underneath are text-based and described ("Search Google News for 'subscription, news, ev'") so that should be fine too.

Enter up to 15 RSS feeds, one per line, and SCS will make a word cloud out of the  top terms along random searches, just like NewsDrizzle, only you get to specify the sources.

While I was testing Stephen’s Cloud Seeder I discovered by accident that it works really well with keyword-based RSS feeds. I generated a bunch of thermal-energy oriented feeds using Kebberfegg and CountryFeed and tossed ’em in to see what would happen. The results ended up being a really good jumping-off point for exploring news about thermal energy.

A screenshot of the results for a search of keyword-based RSS feeds focused on thermal energy. The words in the cloud are much more topically-focused than the first screenshot -- they include solar, conversion, meters, battery, etc.

 

 



July 19, 2023 at 09:28PM
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