Wow. This is so cool.

I was playing around with Tagxedo this weekend. It is such a fantastic tool which turns words into a stunning tag cloud. I used to use Wordle but Tagxedo is hundreds of times better. Go play around with that.

Then I thought … what if I get Tagxedo to take the contents of chowtimes and render them into a visual depiction. I wanted to throw in the blog posts but with over 2000 posts and millions of word, understandbly Tagxedo choked.

I turned my attention to the comments on chowtimes. I thought it would be fun to see who is saying what from the ten thousands foot view.

I first pulled out the list of all the commentors from the database and generated the cloud above. That is the list of the top 200 or so commentors on chowtimes. The size of the names is relative to the number of comments posted by the commentor.

Interesting, huh? You can ignore Ben and Suanne because we do respond to many comments.

LotusRapper is by far the king of the hill, follow by CrispyLechon. ChubbyPanda is right up there too although he does not comment as much anymore. This is because he was very active during chowtimes’ early days.

Roll over the names and see if you can find yours. LOL!

Wait. There are more.

I then took ALL the comments and pass it through Tagxedo and see what people were commenting on chowtimes. This is what I found …

Nothing particularly surprising.

In terms of cuisine, we all talk more about Chinese. Surprisingly, Vancouver is larger than Richmond.

When it comes to meat, it is chicken first, followed by pork and then beef.

Between lunch and dinner, dinner wins. However, it is a dead heat between rice and noodles.

What else … people are polite on chowtimes because the word Hi appeared so many times. Which is good.

The word LOL appeared quite often too. So I would think that people are generally happy reading chowtimes. LOL!

I took the comment one more step further. I wanted to see if Tagxedo can help us understand a bit more about the person and personality of chowtimes’ uber-commentor: LotusRapper and CrispyLechon. I took every single comment that they had made and let Taxedo reveal to us their character.

The above is CrispyLechon’s. Let’s see now … Crispy talks about Chinese food but Filipino is a very close second. I think he is Filipino (LOL!).  He likes pork and meat or rice, but not by much. He uses LOL a lot but say Hi and Thanks a lot more. It tells me he is a polite person. I see that he does a bit of cooking too. Other notable words in his vocabulary are cheap, prices.

The below is what Tagxedo sees in LotusRapper. He shares a lot of links, evident from the http and com used. Unlike Crispy, we can’t find the word cooking in it. Instead, the word restaurant is huge. He must eat out a lot. I can’t find the word cheap although he talks about prices. I guess money is not an issue with him but he wants value. You know, I think he likes fried food too.

What do you think?

Do you think Tagxedo did a good job analyzing them? 🙂

Anyway, go play around with Tagxedo. There are a lot of creative ideas that people are using Tagxedo for.