Online Inspiration: Wordle

OK, I may be the last blogger on the face of the internet to post about Wordle. But I can’t help it; I have to jump on board. I’ve been playing with this toy for weeks now. Just for the benefit of those of you who haven’t read about Wordle elsewhere (there must be two of you!), here’s an intro.

Jonathan Feinberg at IBM created this addictive little toy. Wordle creates graphic word clouds using any text or RSS feed you enter. The size of each word is dependent on how frequently it appears in the text; graphics can be randomized or reset according to orientation, color scheme, and font.  Everything you create with Wordle can be used however you like (even for profit) under a Creative Commons attribution license. Paste in some text and see what happens. Here’s what I came up with when I pasted in my personal life mission statement (it’s seven years old but it still fits):

And here are two different examples of what you get using the Creative Construction feed (click on the images for a closer look):

Apparently we use the word “house” a lot! I think this is a result of our recent “My mother’s house” prompt, since the possessive “mother’s” is also showing predominantly in the word cloud.

You could use Wordle images to create all kinds of things. I’m thinking holiday cards…If you play with Wordle and come up with something cool (and I think it’s pretty much ALL cool!) save it to the Wordle gallery and paste a link to your design in a comment below. Ah, the beauty of words….