The Blog of Ross C Brown

BuzzWatch is a weekly review of the topics covered by CNET.com’s Buzz Out Loud podcast staring Jason Howell, Tom Merritt and Molly Wood. Each weekend (see the Posting Schedule for more details) I’ll be posting three ‘word’ clouds generated from podcast’s ’show notes’ in order to highlight the popular topics of the week in a simple visual form what we can all understand*.

The first word cloud is generated entirely from the podcast description that accompanies each podcast. The second cloud is generated from the story titles included in the show notes and the final word cloud is generated from everything – the blurb, story topics, voice mail description and listener emails.

As to make clouds more relevant, I’ve removed hyperlinks and phrases such as ‘love the show’ and ‘hello JaMoTo’. That said, I don’t have the time nor the willpower to sift through the show notes and remove all the non-relevant words so you’ll have to make do with some padding in the word clouds.

The word clouds are generated using a web application called Wordle by Jonathan Feinberg using data published by CNET.com/CBS Interactive. As with most thing in line, consume at your own risk as the word clouds are for entertainment purposes only.

Finally, if you like what you see please tell your friends and if you’d like to link to the clouds please do so by linking to the blog post and not the image files directly.

*Understanding and extracting useful information from ambiguous word clouds is your problem, not mine.