Ahh.. the concept of tag clouds applied to specific information. What fun. Though I think in this case the clouds are going to have to be a bit more specific before it’s particularly useful.

Stock Cloud (available at http://www.stockcloud.net/ ; in beta) is just what it sounds like, it’s a “tag cloud” that consists entirely of stock symbols. The larger the symbol, the more press releases it has issued. The press wire being used in generating the cloud is Market Wire; a good wire but it would be amazing to see this with a wire that has monster traffic — Business Wire, maybe?

Anyway, click on a symbol and you’ll get a page of information. The page will tell you the number of releases encountered, provide a chart with stock information, list business partners and contact information, and provide a list and links with the latest press releases concerning that company. (The “About” page for Stock Cloud says “We’ve been a bit less then successful extracting business partnership data” so I don’t know how far I’d trust those business partnership listings.)

What a great idea; unfortunately it just left me hungry for more. I would love to see the following things:

1) More wires! If I were PR Newswire I would jump at the chance to provide press releases for a site like this — it’s a unique interface to what’s often a huge hard-to-browse mass of information.

2) An attempt to discover timing — A lot of the stock symbols I looked at ended up being penny or low-price stocks. If I could discover patterns in press release timing and then map them against the stock’s performance, I think I would find interesting data points.

3) The ability to filter by time — There’s no indication on the front page of the timeframe for the cloud. It would be interesting to see how a cloud of a day, week, month, etc. changes. (Comparing cloud snapshots over a series of weeks would be awesome.)

4) The ability to filter by sector — A cloud that has any ol’ symbol is missing a bit of context. How about the ability to show clouds by sector? Or by geographical area? Or search for a keyword and then generate a cloud?

A very cool site. Unfortunately it’s so cool I can think about a hundred more things I’d want to do with it!