I am sure most of you know about word clouds or tag clouds by now. If not, they are representations of some body of text in the form of, well, a word cloud. It's hard to explain better than that, but essentially the word cloud is a bunch of words arranged in a cloud-like shape that show what words appear most often in some body of text. The larger the font of the specific word, the more often it appears in the text.
Why am I blogging about this you ask? Well, actually I follow a lot of people on Twitter. If you don't know what that is, check it out. I may blog about Twitter later, but for now let's focus on word clouds. So, the reason why I thought this would be a good blog post is because I saw one of my tweeps post a link to his word cloud and the name of the service he used to generate the word cloud. Now I have seen these types of services before, but this one is really easy to use and it gives you the ability to customize your cloud with a few simply clicks. The service is called Wordle. The great thing about this one is you can generate a word cloud of pretty much anything as long as you know the URL. Some services require the username and password of the account holder to do these types of things, but this one doesn't.
This is the word cloud from this blog (pwphotographer.blogspot.com).
I generated it yesterday using Wordle. I customized the layout to include
numerous colors, random angles, and a Roman-type font.
This is the word cloud from my sister's blog (lifeonlaurel.blogspot.com).
I generated it yesterday using Wordle. I customized the layout to include
four basic colors, straight angles, and a whimsical font.
So you can see from the images above that the word clouds can look quite different. And it only took me a few minutes to generate both of these word clouds. It's really a fun thing to do if you have a blog or follow someone regularly. Try it out and let me know what you think.
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