More than six years ago, I created a wordle of my 10 most popular blog posts. Back then, word clouds were relatively new and I thought it was an interesting way to explore what I had been writing about. Some words were expected – performance, scorecard, objectives, strategy, metrics. Others were a bit more surprising – often, time, usually, group.

Since these days I write less about performance management and more about leadership and behavior, I decided to revisit the idea and generated the above word cloud on my last 20 blog posts using Tagxedo. Comparing the 2009 word cloud with this new one gives me a few ideas of how my writing has evolved:

• There are fewer large words than there were 6 years ago.
  This means I’m writing about a wider variety of topics, rather than concentrating on a few ideas.
• ‘Books’ and ‘words’ are among the largest words.
  This suggests I get most of my inspiration from books and that words do matter.
• ‘Think’ and ‘know’ are about the same size.
  I take this to mean my posts are equal part opinion and fact.

Then there is the unexpected appearance of the word ‘don’ in the upper left hand side of the image. For a while I couldn’t explain it – after all, I haven’t written about the Mafia or the Spanish title of respect. Eventually, I discovered tagxedo was interpreting the word don’t as two words: don and t. Just like my high school grammar teacher said: avoid using apostrophes.

Anyone see any other surprising words?

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I generated the above word cloud using wordle on my ten most popular posts. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of word clouds, the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

While most of the larger words make sense, I’m surprised by the relative size of the word ‘better’ on the left hand side of the image. Since this blog is often about helping organizations improve, maybe I just need to find some synonyms for the word better.

I am even more surprised by the presence of the word ‘tied’ underneath the very large ‘satisfaction’. I have no good explanation for it being there.

Anyone see any other surprising words?

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