During the coverage of President Obama’s second White House press conference, something interesting happened. CNN used the web tool Wordle, in the most interesting way.

They captured the text of the presidential press conference and plugged it into the word cloud generating software, and presto – instant perspective. The need for pundits to tell you what was important, really wasn’t needed. The words spoke for themselves. What we saw were the words used most often in big bold letters, lesser phrases and words in smaller letters. So with one screenshot, we learned that the most talked about issue during the event was, the budget, followed by going, as in where are we going or what we are going to do.

This is a great example of how the web and new technologies can be applied to what we do in our newsrooms and content centers, each day. This was brilliant on CNN’s part. They generated relevant content from something that was already available to them, they just had to use it.

Got a big story in the making, or a state of the city or state speech around the corner? Plug in the speech and see the most important words on the politician’s minds, then show it to your audiences. You can bet you will generate audience comments and buzz.

And if you were curious, my Wordle from this article.

Enjoy!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 6:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.