Although tagcloud seems a little bit outdated and criticized visualization format, I have no doubt it can be useful sometimes. And if you can create one with only a few key strokes it is pretty sweet. Below I’ll show the technic of extracting Twitter #hashtags but you can use this technic to virtually any text source.

This posts shows how to create heatmaps of conversations taking place on Twitter, this is a proof of concept technic to learn more about our current datasets, this knowledge would be latter applied to the product development cycle. My objective here is to share a simple way to create a quick visualization and be able to make an internal demo.

The book “DATA + DESIGN | a simple introduction to preparing and visualizing information” is a excellent reference to create visualization to several types of data, it guides you through simple and complex data with very clear Dos and Don’ts tips. On top of all it is free.