Word clouds aren’t new, but there’s a new online app for creating them that is worth checking out. Tagxedo allows you to create your clouds using some versatile tools for shaping the appearance of the cloud, which you can then easily save as a .jpg or .png.
This comes to me via a post on the LoveStats blog, where Annie Pettit has posted a couple of her own creations – one based on the text of her resume, and one on all the words in her blog.
I wrote about word clouds back in December (Quick and easy visuals of large text files), and the well-known and very cool tool known as Wordle, the creation of Jonathan Feinberg. Tagxedo does the same thing but works a little differently. Powered by Microsoft’s SilverLight browser plug-in, Tagxedo offers a nifty interface for importing your text (or URL), finely controlling your word choice, and playing with the font, colour, theme and layout of your cloud, including being able to choose a shape. The choice of shapes is rather limited – hearts, stars, rectangles and ovals, mostly. Here’s a star-shaped word cloud based on the 150 most common words on this blog:
(Click for full size image.)
My interest in word clouds is related to visualization of data – in this context, conveying the gist of a mass of text by giving prominence to the most common significant words. For example, last year I used Wordles to visualize tens of thousands of words entered as free-text comments in a survey of alumni. It’s no substitute for real analysis, but it does make a cool presentation slide!
NOTE: Check in tomorrow for Jason Boley’s amazing work with NodeXL for visualizing prospect connections in your data.
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