Building Understanding

So there I am, just catching up on my Netvibes reader, and I find myself reading the Wired article on the internet being abuzz after Senator Obama’s speech. In the article, a cloud of words from all the discussion. So I look for some mention of how they made the image and sure enough, it mentions a tool called Wordle.

Amazing, because just the other day, my colleague, Chad, was asking Jeff and I whether you could generate your own cloud like a tag cloud, only with words of your own choosing.

And now, voila, the tool finds me.

So, maybe this is old news, maybe it’s new to you, like it was to me, mere minutes ago. But go here and play. It has a variety of settings for layout, different fonts, and color options. You can paste in your own text, or enter a URL. I put this very blog in and here’s what I got.

Cool.

I wrote more on the potential of this tool on the Talking Tech blog.