FeedVis dev
FeedVis is an interactive tagcloud for groups of rss feeds. This is the development page; here’s the demo page.
I liked the idea of making a word cloud to examine a group of feeds; however, though there were several options, I wanted more. A plain tagcloud from a feed is static: all the words happen now. Conversations change, and I wanted to see that. I wanted more context, too–information about who was using the words, and how. Hence, FeedVis. It lets you compare tagclouds from various authors and times, as well as giving you access to the posts that actually use the words.
download
Feedvis was designed from the beginning to be portable. There’s no database to set up; you pretty much just paste in your opml and you’re done. The first version is best if you want to run it as a standalone on your server. You can also download the current version that allows users to make accounts.
Thanks to
Chirag Mehta for the idea of combining timeline and tagcloud, Richard Heyes for his php port of the Porter Stemming Algorithm, John Resig and the developers of the amazing jQuery library, Paul Bakaus and Brandon Aaron for their jQuery dropshadow plugin, Jorn Zaefferer for his jQuery tooltip plugin, and Ariel Flesler for the jQuery.ScrollTo plugin. And if I left anyone out, let me know.
Known issues/todo
- flat-file-based user management will break under load
- you should be able to search feeds by desc, blog names, and other criteria
- captcha for sign-up
- there should alternative ways to get the data for users with javascript disabled
- arrow hotkeys
- isoluminant color-coding
- better tooltip: spike, better shadow
- Better Opera support: dropshadow, cal width.
- word-version list gets stuck on hover when there’s just one version
Well, that’s FeedVis. I would love any comments or suggestions; I’ve only been programming since this February, so I’ve lots to learn. Any thoughts?
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FeedVis RSS Feed Tag Cloud Generator…
FeedVis [jasonpriem.com] is an online tag cloud generator with some additional interactive features. Users can select specific time periods, common blog themes or individual blog feeds. Individual tags can be further explored to read specific blog pos…
This looks cool! But I have problem: I’d like to use it with a list of Norwegian blogs, but all I get is a list of short, common words, the equivalents of this, that, is, where and so on… I havn’t looked at the code yet, but could there be some way of making a list of stop-words, words that do not show up in the visualisation?
Thanks for your interest, Magnus. Yes, there’s no problem in adding a list of Norwegian stopwords to the others (I already have French, Spanish, English and German). In fact, I’ve already addedthis list. However, looking at the list I’m still guessing that we’re letting some common words slip through. If you send me a list of any common words that I haven’t included, I’d be glad to add it.
There are, however, two more significant problems: First, as you can see, all of the words are displayed in simple ASCII encoding, meaning that dicritics don’t appear. Second, the stemming algorithm I’m using works only for English words. So, while FeedVis knows that “school” and “schooling” are the same word, it won’t be able to make a similar judgment in other languages. Both problems result from me not anticipating the amount of interest this project would get; it was originally just a learning project for me.
Both problems are fixable. I’ve got my graduate school applications due in a week, so I won’t be able to look at FeedVis till after then. I’ll try to update it before the holidays, though.
That does look like a very swish way of keeping up to date with trends in news and could be extremely useful. I hope the applications go well.
I wish there was a way of integrating this with a Google Reader, because this is SO AMAZING.
I will take a look at it (at the code)… maybe I can figure a way of making it work better with Portuguese…
It doesn’t know synonyms in Portuguese, does it?
I’ve just wrote a post about your great tool on my blog Outils Froids, a french blog for knowledge workers.
It would be again greater if it takes accented words. Actually it just cut them.
Feedvis is really a great tool and I don’t understand why there is no more buzz about it. Hope my post help : http://bit.ly/2g3C
@Cindy: Sorry for not getting your comment up sooner; I’ve been getting over a cold. Thanks for the kind words. No, it doesn’t know synonyms in Portuguese, but it doesn’t really know synonyms in any language. Perhaps you’re speaking of stemming, where words with the same stem (like learn, learning, and learned) are reduced to one. Here, it’s just English, I’m afraid.
If you’re comfortable working with PHP, it should be pretty easy to get a Portuguese stemmer working, though; just replace the stemmer.php class with a Portuguese version and you’re all set.
Also, I know my list of Portuguese stopwords is pretty incomplete; feel free to send any more and I’ll include them.
@Christophe: sorry about the delay; been feeling under the weather. Thanks for the review on Outils Froids; my French is not so great, but what I can understand of your blog, I like. I agree with you that one of the key challenges of the next few year is going to be helping user of the web filter and condense the vast amount of information available.
I’m sorry that FeedVis handles accented words so badly; it’s a side project that I don’t have loads of time for right now, but I am planning some improvements over the next month or so. I’ve gotten a very positive response from the blogosphere en Français, so I’d really like to improve the way FeedVis handles French in particular. Feel free to send me any other suggestions.