Credit: Wordle

FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver recently had a neat post that made use of word clouds to visualize the differing tones of the Gallup survey responses of those Americans who are pro- and anti-health care reform. Around these parts, its raised the idea that the smart uses of word clouds are too few and far between. That, in turn, inspired the production of a word cloud of Connecting America, the national broadband plan released by the FCC yesterday. Frankly, this word cloud doesn't really seem to provide all that much insight into that document. But it did take quite a while to feed 360 pages of report text into the Wordle engine. So here you go.

(With Micah Sifry)

We're always intrigued when we see inside-the-Beltway groups embracing new technologies, so when we heard about the National Taxpayers Union's new visualization comparing the words being used by President Obama to describe health care reform and the actual words in the House bill, we decided to take a closer look.

National Taxpayers Union is using a pair of word clouds to make the case that the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 is full of "the oppressive language of big government," while at the same time Obama's speeches are emphasizing more positive concepts like "freedom," "rights," and "choice." Among the words in H.R. 3200 tagged by NTU as oppressive: "regulate," "prohibit," and "taxes"...