It’s Sunday and my play time with new stuff -- my research today is word clouds -- how to use them and how to create them. Here is the result of my play:
You may even be wondering why you should? Let me answer this as we continue.
Word clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
Some blogs services create them for you and even change with each post.
But did you know there’s a FREE place you can create them to use in other ways?
In fact, you can print them out or share with your friends or even use them in your print marketing materials. In print materials they aren’t active, but they make a great graphic. I like to use them in my eBooks. I also just recently used one for a presentation.
I found a place that allows you the freedom to create and use the word cloud how you’d like: Wordle
At the Wordle web site I created word cloud images to use on my web site, blog, posters, flyers, and even a class cover page?
Here you create them based on the text you enter. Enter the text the site creates the image in a beautiful graphic, with different sizes and emphases on each word according to how often you used each word. It also provides you with choices on it’s direction.
I did a fun one for this post (see image above). They gave me the XHTML code to post. It took seconds to complete.
You can even enter the URL and it creates the word cloud for you based on what’s on the URL. Once the word cloud is designed, you can play with the layout, font, colors, and more to make it look the way you want. Try it out and see what you think!
This is the word cloud made for the Out of the Blog, Into th
Additional Resources:
Another place to create tag clouds: TagCrowd.com
