Word Clouds–Wordle and Beyond
April27
Five Ways to Make Word Clouds from Text
Wordlings is a new service for creating word clouds from blocks of text. Sign into Wordlings with your Twitter or Facebook account to have it create a word cloud of your posts. You can also copy and paste chunks of text into Wordlings. Wordlings allows you to choose from a large variety of shapes and sizes for displaying your word clouds.
Tagul is a free word cloud generator that offers the option to link every word in your word cloud to a Google search. Click on any word in your word cloud to be taken directly to a Google search results page for that word. Tagul creates a word cloud from text you copy into your Tagul account. Tagul will also generate a word cloud from any url you specify. Just as you can with other word cloud generators, Tagul allows you to specify words to ignore in creating your word clouds. Once your word cloud is created Tagul provides you with an embed code to put your cloud on your blog or website.
Word It Out creates word clouds out of any text that you paste into the word cloud generator. Once the word cloud is created you can customize the size and color scheme of the cloud. You can also customize the font used in your word cloud. The feature of Word It Out that I like the best is that you can choose to have Word It Out ignore any word or words you choose. Ignoring words keeps them out of the word cloud.
Tagxedo makes it very easy to customize the design of your word clouds. You can select from a variety of shapes in which to display words or you can design your shape for your word cloud. You can enter text into the word cloud generator manually or simply enter a url from which Tagxedo will generate a word cloud. As with other word cloud generators you also have options for excluding words from your word clouds.
Amongst educators Wordle is probably the most famous word cloud generator. Wordle provides many options for color, shapes, and fonts for displaying your word clouds. A couple of years ago Tom Barrett started an Interesting Ways presentation about using Wordle in the classroom. That presentation now has 51 ideas. Check it out below.