Fun: The AVC Word Cloud

Happy 2014! In between celebrating Christmas, hanging with family, and ringing in the New Year I managed to put together a visualization of the words used on avc.com. AVC, written by Fred Wilson, is probably one of the most popular “start up” blogs on the Internet. It covers a wide array of topics from “MBA Mondays”, USV portfolio companies and of course general startup and technology news. Given the range of topics and and that the blog has been active since 2003, it naturally seemed like generating a word cloud would produce interesting results. With the goal of generating word clouds in mind, I set off the day after Christmas.

Checkout the finished product at http://symf.setfive.com/d3_avc_blog_cloud/. I actually decided to use Scala to scrape and process the data, look for a follup post on coming to Scala from PHP.

Taking a quick glance at the clouds, a few things do jump out:

• “Android” enters the top 100 in 2010 and has remained there since.
• Amazon is surprisingly absent past 2007
• Apple hasn’t made the top 100 in any year.
• It’s interesting to see when USV portfolio companies like Disqus and Zemanta enter and exit.
• Bitcoin makes the list for 2013
• Blackberry, one and done
• Facebook peaked in 2007 and then steadily declines until it drops out this year
• Google hits the list for every year
• Twitter gets in at 2007 and sticks through this year

Posted In: Demo

Tags: avc, d3, scala, visualization