Wordle Me This

For those of you who like the word cloud feature on blogs, you're gonna love this.  For those of you who love words, you're gonna adore this.  And for those of you who like to look at the world with a different set of eyes, you're gonna have your socks knocked off.

What's this socks-knocking thing?  Just an application called Wordle.  In their words, it's a "toy for generating 'word clouds' from text you provide."  It's incredibly easy to use.  Within less than a minute, I created my first Wordle.

I created two different Wordles:  one using random words (a bit like Power Words) and another using this blog's feed.  I much prefer the second.  Probably because there were more words from which to choose on the entire blog rather than just whatever words I could come up with.

We even used this as a strategy in the last class of Ready, Set, Write. As a group, we came up with a list of words and created a Wordle.

A couple of notes that I've found just in the few minutes of playing with Wordle:

• Since it works on the word cloud basis, if you enter words individually, you have to enter some words more than once to get that big word look.
• It looks at individual words.  If you type in a phrase like "old partner," it doesn't recognize it as one unit.  It sees two words, "old" and "partner."
• If you don't have a blog or RSS feed, instead of entering random words, you can cut and paste from anything. 
• Once you create your Wordle, you can right click on words and remove them.  This was helpful when I created the Wordle above.  Since one of my recent posts was a funny look at how people use online communities using the example of light bulbs, "lightbulbs" and "bulbs" were very big in my Wordle.  I liked "light" being big, but I didn't think "lightbulbs" and "bulbs" were truly indicative of me and Write Well Me.  :) 
• You can randomize your Wordle layout by clicking the "Randomize."  (I went back to create a Wordle to make sure that the correct command was truly "Randomize," and I got caught up in making a new Wordle.  I forgot to check, and I had to go make another one.  It IS "randomize.")
• There are several options for Wordles.  I have no idea what all the different options are, but I'm having fun seeing the different colors and fonts.

After doing the Wordle above for Ready, Set, Write, I want to do Wordles for everything!

Comments

[bill]

Okay - this is a cool site - I just found your blog and saw the posting about this - I work with the Wellness Program at my company and can just imagine the Fun I will have with this - Thank YOU.