I happened across Jonathan Feinberg’s Wordle (”Beautiful Word Clouds”) visualization recently.  Pretty fun, but I instantly wanted a way to create one from an RSS feed. I didn’t see a way to do it, so I checked the FAQ confirmed there wasn’t one available:

How about a field to enter a blog/web page/wikipedia article’s URL?

If you know of an interesting text source that exposes a JSON interface, then I’d be happy to add a field for it on the “create” page. Unfortunately, a web site that doesn’t expose its data via JSON is not useful to Wordle, because Wordle does all of its text processing on your computer, in the browser. A JSON URL can be dynamically retrieved without hitting the Wordle server.

Yahoo Pipes immediately came to mind. I noodled around with the Term Extractor module in Pipes, a handy way to pull significant words from the items in an RSS feed. Thanks to the permissive Creative Commons license used by Wordle, I copied the necessary resources to my server, added a new JavaScript function to Wordle’s code to call the new Pipe, get a JSONP callback, and push the resulting feed terms to the Wordle Applet.

Voila: http://labs.techbrew.net/wordle/

The CC license on the mod stands, so if Mr. Feinberg finds the mod useful, he’s free to grab it, clone the Pipe, and put it back into Wordle proper.