Word Clouds
What is a word cloud?
Word Clouds are visual depictions of the word content for a website: a keyword used to describe a piece of information used on a website. This description is known as a “tag”, and the information described by tags might be online bookmark, computer files or image files. A “word cloud” therefore is a collection of single words used to link to the content of a website, though those words are generally placed in an artistic, eye-catching pattern that remains easy for the reader to use.
How do I create a word cloud?
If you’re at all curious about viewing new websites, you’ve no doubt found an internet site that uses a word cloud to interlink the pages on that site. You might have wondered how you could create your own word cloud. With features on Web 2.0 and a few word cloud websites out there, now building a word cloud is easier than ever.
Even I can do it.
Creating Your Own Word Cloud
Not long ago, I was over at wordle.net and created my own word cloud. All you do is place the url of your website into the program, hit “create” and voila!, you have a brand spanking new word cloud. Click on the link below to see the Word Skit Word Cloud that’s based on this blog.
I have to say, there are some great words that show up when you create a word cloud from this site. We talk about all kinds of words here, so you see some wild word combinations on our word cloud.
Just a quick look shows uncommon words like “orthography” and “quotidian”. Someone seeing those words have to think, “Boy, that is one pretentious writer on that website, using those words. Little do they know that those words came up in our word-of-the-day, interesting words and weird word discussions.
A Site About Words
More telling is the words that are shown more prominently. “Words”, “word”, “know”, “English” and “language” are the boldest words found in our little word cloud. “Unscramble”, “sentence” and “dictionary” are figure pretty large on our word cloud. Online, internet, global and netspeak stand out, while official, Oxford and correct show up pretty well.
So if you just look at the boldest words and put them together in a phrase, you’ll get a pretty darned good idea what the Word Skit website is all about.
You’ll have to excuse my comments on the Wordle site: I was just excited about finding a really cool word resource online. It’s so easy that I may have to use this for one or two of my blogs. You can, too.
Using Wordle for Word Clouds
All you have to do is create your word cloud by linking a url to the word cloud creation tool, create a screen capture, post the word cloud on your blog or website, then attribute the Wordle website when you post it.
You can also use AlphaWorks to build word clouds, if for some reason you don’t like the looks of the Wordle website.
There are a million word clouds out there on the internet. I’ve seen a USA Gov word cloud and an Iran Election Word Cloud, which may be the coolest and most topical word cloud I’ve seen in a while. I linked to it above to show you the image, which I have to admit is a little cooler and more important than the Word Skit Word Cloud.
But you know what?
Words can change the world, so everyone in the world out there who loves ideas like freedom, keep on typing.