The State of the Union Is... Bloggy

As of this writing, the 2007 State of the Union Address is about an hour away. Personally, I haven't decided if I'm going to watch it live or catch the episode of '24' that I taped yesterday. Here are few bloggy State of the Union links:

* The Wall Street Journal highlights a neat Presidential speeches tag cloud -- tags are labels that people use for content (like blog entries or photos). A tag cloud is a way to visualize information that shows you what the popular tags are: The bigger a word is, the more frequently it's used.

Anyway, blogger Chirag Mehta took the text of a whole bunch of presidential speeches (including all of the State of the Union addresses), and put them in tag cloud format, showing the top 100 words in each speech (after stripping out too-common words like "the" and "and"):

Tag cloud from the first SOTU address by George Washington in 1790.

The slider at the top lets you move foward and back in time.

Tag cloud from George W. Bush's 2006 SOTU address.

Unlike many tag clouds, the color of the word also carries some information -- brighter colors show newer words; darker colors are older words. It's a neat way to convey several different dimensions of information at a glance.

* Over at The Stump (the AOL News Elections Blog), they'll be blogging the speech and its aftermath (outside of actual elections, this is kind of like the Super Bowl for political types).

* Since the DC area is sucha political-type town, it's not surprising that there are actual State of the Union viewing parties.

* And of course, there are plenty of varieties of State of the Union drinking games, such as Wonkette's version [strong language warning, par for the course]

* On a somewhat local note, the Democratic response will be given by Virginia Senator Jim Webb, who as it happens, has an unofficial MySpace profile, in addition to his mostly-placeholder official Web site.

Happy viewing! -- Joe

Tags: state of the union, SOTU, politics