Wordle on Sunday’s raindrops and rainbows

It is no secret that I like tag clouds. They provide a great way to see what people are saying by popularity. They have really taken off in the past few years. Even the CBC was gotten into the act, with a tag cloud of the platforms of the three major parties in the 2009 election.

Creating them is a bit of an art with funky algorithms and the like. There are quite a few tools out there, but Wordle seems to be the most common. I used it for my announcement of my candidacy in the 2008 municipal elections, for example. So I figured I would run the raindrops and rainbows from the Safer Cycling Oak Bay table at the fair on Sunday and see what I got:

Rainbows

Rainbows from comm. fair
Things people liked about biking in Oak Bay

Raindrops

Raindrops from Community Fair
Things people disliked about biking in Oak Bay

A few things pop out at me: There was a strong current of environment and community running through the likes. Nice to see that bikes not only help the environment, they help everybodies health and help build community as a nice side benefit. The dislikes centred around two themes: respect and lack of infrastructure. People wanted to see more respect between drivers and cyclists, especially with regard to both needing to follow rules of the road. Bike parking and lanes were much talked about, as well as the growing number of potholes in roads.

As I said yesterday, I am very pleased at the amount of feedback we got and that people took the time to think about what they wrote. I am truly looking forward to the next few months. If you wanted to give us feedback in person, the next time to do so will likely be at Bike to Work Week coming up from the 11th to the 17th. When details are worked out, I will post more.