Kiss Confidential: Articles - Kiss Insight

This is where we'll feature insight to inspire and inform you. Interviews with Kiss DJs, insight on new trends and changing listening behaviour - we'll cover it all

KISS THE WORD CLOUD 06 May 2009

Here at Kiss we love innovative research tools as much as we like innovative music. We've recently stumbled upon a fantastic, free online tool called Wordle

What Wordle does is go through any text you paste into it (filtering out everyday common words, pronouns etc). and produce a visual representation of the words used as a 'word cloud'. The clever bit is that Wordle bases the size of each word produced in a cloud on the amount of times that word has cropped up in the text. What this means is that if people using the same word in their texts (such as 'play') then that word will appear on as massive on the word cloud to be visually representative of how many times people have used it. Likewise if a word is hardly used in the text then it will appear as a small word on the word cloud and everything in between. We thought this would be a fantastic way of contextualising all the mobile phone texts that we receive into our shows here at Kiss.

What you can see below are word clouds for the 3 Kiss breakfast shows, Swerve's show and FNK/Kissalicious/SNK - all based on texts sent into those shows in the last week. As well as those there are also word clouds based on texts sent into Kisstory and the 11pm to 1am Monday to Thursday specialist shows collated over the last 2 weeks. It makes for fascinating reading and creates a really good snapshot of how listeners interact with our stations. It's really interesting how certain key place names crop up in the breakfast shows and how Kisstory seems to be dominated by work place listening, whilst Swerve and the specialist shows are all about the DJs and people getting their shout outs. What it also highlights is the sheer randomness of what our listeners send into us. If you are really bored and want to play Where's Wally style 'word cloud bingo' then try and find the words Roast, Wotsit, Udders, Croydon and Uranus - they are all in there somewhere!