Those graphics loving geeks over at Last.fm are at it again. Remember the flower power experiment? Now Last.fm staffer Andrew Clegg describes how he’s grabbed a pile of the online music service’s user tags and combined them with data from the Echo Nest’s million song dataset. Then he brought the whole goulash over to the IBM word cloud generator. This application takes a weighted list of words and throws it up in visual form.
The end result is fun images like this one for “blues”:
And this for “soul”:
“What’s most striking for me about these [tag clouds] is not how much they differ,” Clegg notes, “but in fact how often some of the words appear prominently across genres. Almost everyone sings about love, for example, with the exception of Rap and Hip-Hop, and time comes up… time and time again.”
One more. Here’s the cloud for “goth”:
