If you visit the new link I've added to the sidebar, you can play around with a dinky Web toy I made this afternoon. It's a series of tag clouds that report the words most frequently found in reviews of this year's indie hype monster, Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible." It's hardly revelatory -- and a long toss from scientific -- but it can still make for a bit of fun.

If nothing else, it's clear that the band's lead singer, Win Butler, is getting more attention that his mates. And a bit interesting, though hardly surprising, that the band's debut album, Funeral, played pretty high in most reviews.

How about how often "war" makes its way in?

I made the hypecloud using a free application developed by a bright guy named Chirag Mehta. You can check that out here. Mehta has done some cool stuff with it, particularly an excellent cloud that displays the most commonly used words in presidential rhetoric since the founding of America.

This is a post Ben made on March 17, 2007, 3 years, 5 months ago.

It is filed with other posts about car, celebrations, complaints, pop music and the news.

Topics include arcade fire, data visualization, humor, music, music criticism, quantitative analysis, rhetoric, web and word cloud.

Some similar posts are "The sweet spot between punditry and misanthropy," "Is McDonalds financing the Black Disciples?," "Tower Records, the Dead-Enders and Me," "Let them eat Yellowcake: Iran's hottest YouTubes" and "Rock over Google! Rock on DC!"

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