Worth a thousand words

That’s it. It doesn’t matter what I do now. I could blog about what I had for breakfast this morning, or I could blog about something that will wipe millions off the price of bank shares. It won’t make any difference, because I missed my chance.

I missed my chance because the first two words of a blog post are all I have to grab the attention of the average reader. According to Chris Brauer, the first pair of words in any web story are “the most critical of the entire online experience”. They are the single most important differentiator over whether a blog browser will read on, or log off. Writing for the internet is undemocratic. Not all information is created equal.

But if two words are all I have and a picture is worth a thousand, Wordle may offer a creative compromise. This nifty tool creates a visual representation of a page’s content, generating a “word cloud” that reveals which terms crop up most. Thanks to Etan and Michael for the recommendation.

My world according to Wordle

If this picture is anything to go by, it seems that news, Twitter, people and the BBC are just a few of my journalistic preoccupations. It may not reveal quite as much as reading through the posts themselves, but it’s an useful gadget to facilitate another popular journalistic preoccupation: analysing everything we write.