Just got back from the Banff Forum this weekend where I had a great time making new friends, meeting up with old friends and – with Taylor – doing a panel where we discussed our Canadian Literary Review (LRC)article on how the Left is killing progressive politics. The audience gave us lots of positive feedback and, more importantly, new insights which is always both encouraging and helpful.
On the same day I discovered – thanks to the National Post (hey, it was delivered free to my hotel room) – a great site called wordle.net which creates word clouds out of any text or web page you submit it. Very cool stuff. The National Post ran each of the party’s policy platforms through wordle which I thought was creative for a newspaper (hard to imagine the Globe doing something like that). Sadly, I wish I could link to the images, but they don’t seem to available online.
Turns out the Star (using Tagcrowd) has also been creating clouds out of the speeches Dion and Harper gave one day apart at the Empire and Canadian Clubs in Toronto. Notice how the words Stephan and Dion don’t appear in Harper’s cloud whereas Stephen and Harper are among the most used words by Dion? Interesting. Also of note? Dion seems to think “jobs” will resonate, whereas Harper seems to believe “taxes” will.
Anyway, to come back to the LRC piece, I was so inspired by these tags I decided I’d create one for the LRC piece. Tada:
.JPG "Wordcloud of neo-progressive LRC piece")
Created using Wordle.net
eaves.ca 
The forum you talked about sounds really interesting and I wish I could have attended it. Fortunately you've put that link in your text so I can read at least something about that very interesting topic. Thanks for that.
The forum you talked about sounds really interesting and I wish I could have attended it. Fortunately you've put that link in your text so I can read at least something about that very interesting topic. Thanks for that.