What do the words we use say about us?
As part of the reflective process many of us do this time of year (do you do that, too?) I wanted to see what my blog posts could reveal about the kinds of things I seemed passionate about in 2009. In fact, I started this process right after the Thanksgiving holiday and even wrote a couple of posts early in December about what YOU (collectively) thought were most interesting from my posts and what some of the "aha" moments were that I learned in 2009.
Extending that exercise a bit, I decided it would also be helpful to take all the blog posts -- ALL of them -- I had written in 2009 and analyze them for the most prolific words. (Too much time on my hands over the holiday? LOL. Not really. Let's just call it a survival technique. I got antsy in between video productions for the social media vBook project. I also found it was otherwise all too easy to slide on my training and eat chocolates, cake and drink eggnog all day while hanging out with family.)
Anyway, the result of that analysis is the word cloud above. It shows the top 300 words in this blog during 2009. Words appearing in bigger text were used more frequently relative to other words in the data set. If that visualization is any indication, then clearly I had social on the brain.
I then applied a filter to more easily focus on the top 50 words. The result of that filter is shown below. It seems to suggest I was more specifically focused on topics related to Twitter, Facebook, video, as well as people, networking and sharing (content).
All in all, I was pleased. I was pleased because that's all about in line with the things I set out to accomplish at the beginning of 2009.
Social media was/is huge. In fact I wrote a book about it and am now producing an online vBook to complement it. But more than that, I also started the year with a concerted effort to expand my social and professional networks more during 2009. While social networks like Twitter and Facebook (and LinkedIn and even blogging networks) helped me to that end, I think it was also my participation in live meetups (tweetups, lunch meetings, professional association meetings, and so on) that helped solidify many of those virtual handshakes into more tangible relationships.
Now, as I turn a new chapter (and discover a few more gray hairs to boot!) my hope for 2010's word cloud is to see more emphasis on words related to "sharing", "learning" and, yes, "networking". I'll still expect "social" to have a significant share of screen real estate. But, with some of the cool new relationships I had the benefit of solidifying last year, I'd hope that next year's word cloud will also suggest the "partnerships" and "friendships" those relationships were able to generate.
What kinds of words are you hoping will be your buzz words for 2010?
If you liked this, or any of the articles on this site, please subscribe!
Are you a fellow "Tweep"? Follow me on Twitter (@melaclaro)
Or, connect with me on LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/melaclaro.
Got friends? Forward this post or save it to any of the bookmarking sites below.
