common comments

after the unexpected success from posting matt’s presentation of the hundred-dollar laptop at siggraph last week (250,000 views and 2,500 comments in 5 days) we started to wonder about the quality of all this press – especially the hot/cold nature of youtube comments. i’m an avid flickr and youtube user, because i make a lot of photos and videos, but it’s amazing how different the two experiences are. my flickr contacts are often friends and acquaintances; the comments are always kind or inquisitive, and i have about 40,000 views of my 17,000 photos. my youtube subscribers are all strangers; the comments are always extremely positive or extremely negative, and there are about 850,000 views of my 30 or so videos. above is a tag cloud of the 100 most repeated words from the youtube comments on the laptop video, which is by far the most popular i’ve put up in such a short span. as you can see, most of the terms are not negative, although several swears made it into the top 100 words (courtesy of tagcrowd.com).