Word Clouds

What does your CV look like as a picture? How about your favourite love letter? The text of Great Expectations? Your child's latest school report? What about that groaningly awful memo from Sales? Wordle is where you go to find out.

It is, as creator Jonathan Feinberg puts it, "a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide'. The more frequently a word appears in the original text, the more prominence it gets in the visual representation.

The source material can be text you simply paste in yourself, or the url of a blog, blog feed or a webpage that has an Atom or RSS feed. The program then builds up the word cloud as you watch. It's hypnotic. Once the cloud is made you can change the font, colours and layouts to change the look. Then you can do what you want with it - admire it for a moment, then leave the site; save it to the site for others to admire; save it to print on a t-shirt or card. There's no cost for any of it (you can make a donation to Feinberg via the site, but it's purely voluntary).

Whether they are words you love or loathe, there is a left-field satisfaction in seeing them rendered as an object in this way.

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