Wordle

Wordle is a great little website that lets users visualize how often words appear in large (or small) amounts of text. Their applet is made with an aesthetic eye, permitting the user to control the maximum number of words to include, the colour scheme, the font, and the alignment of the words. While there are surely some great and useful applications of this tool, I decided it would be fun to visualize the artists in my iTunes list. Simply exporting an iTunes list to xml will not work, so I'll provide the few steps required to make an image like mine...

1. Select all songs in iTunes library. Alternatively, for large lists, deselect all view options except "Artists." This will limit the amount of data exported to the clipboard and will speed things up. The song title, unfortunately, cannot be deselected.
2. Copy and paste this list into a spreadsheet program such as Excel, OpenOffice Spreadsheet, or Google Docs Spreadsheet.
3. Select the entire artists column; copy and paste this as unformatted text into a text document (Textpad, Notepad, TextEdit, etc. will suffice).
4. Do a "Find and Replace" of all the spaces. Replace them with tildes: "~". This is necessary so that Wordle considers "Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band" as "Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band" and not "Captain," "Beefheart," "and," "his," "Magic," & "Band."
5. Cut and paste this text into the first field of the Worde Create page.
6. Click on "Go," and adjust according to your taste.

Here's what I managed with the 400 (but not including the many mostly unfinished songs I've made under my own name) artists that appear the most often in my iTunes Library...

 

And here, the permalink Wordle gives you when you publish to their users' gallery:

If you click the "Advanced" tab, there is a way to manually define the weight of each word. For example, the provinces and territories of Canada weighted by population: