Speeches by Obama versus speeches by Clinton. Blogs by men versus blogs by women. Song lyrics from the 80s versus lyrics from the 50s. The list of tag clouds on Many Eyes is a study in contrasts.

There’s no question that our users like visualizing the differences between related texts, but making comparisons by looking at one text a time is difficult. Today we’re launching a new version of our tag cloud, which we hope will allow for easier and clearer analyses.

If you want to compare two texts directly, you can merge them (see the instructions for details) and then see a special “interleaved” tag cloud, which will let you compare side by side the relative frequencies of the words in the two texts. You can see an example here:

which shows the US presidential State of the Union address from 2002 and 2003. The 2002 speech is in orange and the 2003 speech is in blue. You can see a number of differences directly: “Afghanistan” shrinks dramatically from 2002 to 2003, and “Saddam” seems to grow in proportion.

Give the new tag cloud a spin! We’re looking forward to seeing what comparisons our users draw next.