Monday, May 30, 2011

WORDLE


Today is one of several "theme days" offered during this year's blogathon. While I haven't participated in the other theme days because I really wanted to concentrate on free-form writing of my own ideas, I did want to check out today's theme which is "Wordles." After doing so I decided that this could be fun and decided to participate.   
So what’s a Wordle you may ask?
A Wordle is a tag cloud (also known as a word cloud).
Tag clouds are a way of visualizing the frequency in which certain words, keywords or metadata are used and can be utilized as an aid to navigating a website.
The original use of tag clouds on a major website can be traced back to Flickr, Technorati and Del.icio.us in the early 2000’s.
While the original enthusiasm for tag clouds plummeted in the mid-2000’s further software development that led to the use of visualizing word counts in free-form natural texts and brought back their popularity as new ways were thought of to make them truly useful.
           Wordle was created by IBM senior software engineer Jonathan Feinberg in June of 2008 and rapidly found a number of ways to be used in different fields including education and art.
           According to the Wordle website, “Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
          Just playing around with Wordle for a bit was a lot of fun and I fully intend to explore it further as I can see many uses for it moving forward. I strongly suggest that you visit the site and play around with it.
           In the meantime here’s my Wordle as my May 30th blog post:

4 comments:

  1. How did you get your wordle to look so clear- I tried but it is only clear if you click on it and it opens up in another window. It was interesting doing the wordle.

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  2. I used the "Print Screen" function on my PC and then pasted it into the Pain application. Cropped it and saved it as a .png file.

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  3. Your wordle is quite big !! I guess you made it from your blog url?

    @Anjuli,
    I've created one for you. Pls check your mail box.
    Nisha - Le Monde-A Poetic Travail

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  4. Nisha - Yes I did. I figured that it was a fitting end to the blogathon to tip the hat to all my posts!

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