Nora Brown Design

Wordle: Generate Awesome Word Clouds

Wordle.net calls itself “toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide”. I think it’s much more than a toy, but it is a lot of fun. You can provide text in a number of ways:

• Paste text in. Maybe a chapter of your novel, or your latest newsletter or blog post. A manifesto would work really well.
• Provide any RSS feed. Put in your blog’s RSS feed address, or that of a competitor or colleague.
• On the “Advanced tab” you can also paste in a list of words, with the specific weight you want to give them in the cloud.

The more often a word appears in your text (or the more weight you give it in your Advanced list) the larger it will appear in the cloud. Once the cloud is generated, you can change all kinds of setting such as the color palette, layout, and font.

Though Wordle is mostly for fun, it is also useful to see what words are most prominent in a piece of text. If you generate one with your blog’s RSS feed, and find that the largest words aren’t related to your topic, something is amiss.

View a screencast which includes demonstration of Wordle.