farmdoc's blog post number 560

I write today of a cute, and maybe useful, computer program I came across a few days ago. Called Wordle, it’s the brainchild of Jonathan Feinberg, a Senior Software Engineer at IBM Research. According to its website ‘Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and colour schemes’. It’s great fun. You can paste text into the box; or enter the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed; or (and this one’s lost on me) you can enter a del.icio.us user name to see the tags. For Wordle to produce a cloud, you need Java loaded on your computer. Once your cloud’s created, as well as the tweaks mentioned above, you can remove numbers, make all words upper or lower case, remove common words, specify the maximum number of words in the cloud, make the words horizontal or vertical or a mixture, place the words in alphabetical order, and shuffle the words. Wordle created the cloud above, from the entire text of Alzheimer’s: a Love Story. I’m having fun with Wordle. I hope you do too. Thank you, Mr Feinberg.