You’ve probably heard of Tag Clouds by now. This morning I read on Michael Stephens’ blog about a site called Wordle. It’s a similar idea to that of tag clouds, but instead of collecting the tags that have been applied to something and visually displaying their popularity, Wordle looks at all the words in any text you provide and creates a cloud based on the most commonly used words in the text. It doesn’t look like there’s much of a word limit in this Java-based application. I was able to copy and paste a 15-page paper and generate the cloud from it and Michael’s example was the first two chapters of his dissertation. You can either save your resulting image to their Wordle Gallery or else save the screenshot by hitting Print-Screen and pasting it into Paint, MS Word, Adobe Photoshop or Acrobat or whatever.
One very cool thing about this program (apart from its existence) is that the “cloud” not only has the words in different sizes, but different colors, fonts, and alignments. Some words are vertical and some are horizontal, with the resulting image being a mishmash of words in different directions, sizes, and colors. You can even customize the layout and choose “mostly vertical,” “all horizontal,” or even “every which way.” Pretty cool!
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