So I’ve been watching other people use Wordle with envy for the past few months. It’s such a great little tool, it basically summarises your text into a graphical word cloud where more commonly used words are larger and less commmonly used words are smaller. You can also customise colour of words, the direction they point, the font and the background etc. so you can get a visual summary of a block of text.
Well, *finally* I had a use for it. While preparing a conference presentation I was wondering what on earth the title slide would look like. What could possibly sum up my next half hour? And it came to me! Wordle! Of course! I would finally get to be one of the cool kids! So I grabbed the text from my conference paper, opened Wordle and pasted the text. “Look-ing goo-ood” I thought to myself in a sing song voice. I couldn’t believe it was so easy! After my minor efforts I noticed that my keyword wasn’t big enough. Then I realised there were two instances of my key word, with one being a plural – but not a problem, I just used the find and replace function in Word to sort that out and reimported my text. One import and some customisations (and some playing around thinking “this is soooo cool! I get to make a Wordle all on my own!”) later and there it was. A lovely wordle title summarising my presentation.
So here it is! My first Wordle. I’m so proud B-)
Filed under: random, technology | Tagged: presentation, summary tool, tag cloud, word cloud, word graphics, wordle
I agree with you, Wordle is so much fun. I am sure it will continue to evolve and develop like so many other on-line cool things. There is a transience about each and every wordle you create and unless you save a great randomised option – that precious wordle is gone before you know it.