Web2.0 technologies have created many new ways for people to use the web and it presents itself as a grand platform for innovation. One of these innovations that I’ve got stuck on lately (thanks again to Hilda) is Wordle.
While it is easy to get mesmerised by the visual aspect of Wordle’s results and spend hour upon hour playing with the different layouts, fonts and colours – there is a deeper function that should not be neglected. On Wordle’s homepage they humbly describe their application as a “toy for creating ‘word clouds’ from the text you provide”. This text may be from a bunch of text pasted or entered by the user, from a URL or Blog that has an Atom or a RSS feed or from your del.icio.us account. The result is the visual display of words collected from given source, with more frequently recurring words being displayed larger than less frequently recurring words.
The function that should not be neglected is right before your eyes – larger words can be indicative of content subject matter. If the text you entered covers, for example, an article on Web2.0 applications used by librarians and the word Blog appears larger than say the word RSS you get a sense of what the focus of the article is. Say you come across a good-looking web article and you’re in too much of a rush to read it through, you can enter the text in Wordle and get a basic idea of the topics the article focussed on.
This is but one of the (I would imagine) many functions that such a fun tool can host – but enough chit-chat here is for example the surprising result Wordle gave when I entered our blog as the text source:
And because it’s so much fun: here’s one of my del.icio.us tags:
Filed under: social software | Tagged: applications, Web2.0, word_cloud
