After doing a quick post on Saturday utilizing a new-found tool (Wordle) to make my Master's Project Proposal into a word cloud, upon checking my RSS aggregator today it seems that Wordle has taken over the universe.
While I tend not to necessarily be a big fan of the latest fad tools (I can be a bit oppositional at times), the pure ease of operation and the beauty/meaning inherent in the created word/tag clouds is quite enrapturing. Although it is extremely interesting and perhaps a big enlightening to see people's del.icio.us tags in a beautiful cloud, perhaps the true power of this tool is to turn any text into a word cloud. The question that is most important (to me) is whether or not this is just a fun tool to perform a quick trick, or if it can be used to change the way text is interpreted. Any insights?
I did a quick perusal of backlinks and trackbacks from Wordle related posts in my reader just now. Here's what I found:
- My favorite of the bunch: Amit Argawal turned well known speeches into word clouds. They include A More Perfect Union (Barack Obama), I Am Profoundly Sorry (Bill Clinton), and I Have a Dream (Martin Luther King, Jr.), among others.
- Over at think:lab, Christian Long turned Macbeth into a word cloud
Del.icio.us tag clouds
- Chris Lehmann's is overly education[al]
- Will Richardson likes tools
- Mike Sansone is more of a business, strategy, marketing, blogging kind of guy
- Tim Stahmer seems to enjoy free, web 2.0, photography, tools
- Anol Bhattacharya goes for web 2.0, business, design
- D'Arcy Norman likes to wordpress, blogcomment, [on] drupal, photography
- Bryan Alexander is all about web 2.0
- Gardner Campbell is into education[al] blog[s and] podcast[s]
- Sarah believes in web 2.0, education
- Wendy Smith likes SCIENCE (and some other stuff)
- Alan Levine is the most well rounded of the bunch, but seems to like hz's followed by numbers.
And I leave you with my own del.icio.us tag cloud, which I don't feel gives you a full picture of my interests, but if you knew very little about me, it would certainly give you a little insight:
UPDATE- To emphasize the craze that Wordle has been in the last week, see the image below: