Measuring the President's Words

These two keyword clouds compare the text of President Bush's first State of the Union address — delivered less than five months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — with Tuesday's 50-minute speech.

What are keyword clouds? You've seen these on Flickr and some blogging sites. They list commonly-occurring words in a body of text, giving greater visual weight to those that appear more often. They're used for distilling a large amount of text into something that can be processed in a glance. Of course, they lack any kind of context, but who needs that? (We're kidding.)

Hold your mouse over a word for a moment to see how many times it appeared in the text of the speech.