Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Cloudy

In his post today, Stewart Sternberg of The House of Sternberg introduced me to Wordle, a Website that generates word clouds (visual representations of the content) from text. The more frequently a word is used in the source text, the more prominently it shows up in the cloud.

The site is easy to use. You can create a Wordle by pasting text or entering a URL. The images you create are yours to use in any way you choose (even for commercial purposes). There is also an option to save them to a gallery on the Website where they're available for anyone to view.

As an experiment, I copied and pasted in my last blog post, "Carry That Weight".  Here's the result:


I liked the way it looked, but if you don't, you can change the appearance by using different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

I suspect I'm not done playing with this Website.

4 comments:

  1. hmm, looks a bit like a mind map or concept diagram. Interesting.

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  2. Christine, in researching Wordles, I found out that some teachers actually use them for educational purposes.

    Betsy, Thanks!

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  3. Looks like fun. I'll have to give it a try.

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