The Tater Blog » lifehacker http://www.thetaters.com/blog postings from Taterland Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:57:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Word clouds http://www.thetaters.com/blog/2010/04/09/word-clouds/ http://www.thetaters.com/blog/2010/04/09/word-clouds/#comments Sat, 10 Apr 2010 02:28:37 +0000 Craig http://www.thetaters.com/blog/?p=277 OK, this is pretty cool. I read a posting over at Lifehacker about Tagxedo, a webapp for generating word clouds. These have been around for awhile – another popular one is Wordle. Basically, a word cloud creates a graphic representation of the words entered into it, either by typing, copying & pasting, or just pointing it to a URL on the web. In the Tags section of this blog you can see a similar idea, but no where near as fun to look at!

The idea is that the more a word shows up in the text, the larger its word cloud equivalent will be. So, for example, in this shot I simply input the address of this blog. Since most of the postings on the main page currently have to do with menagerie as well as several about our TWIRL radio shows, these terms stand out.

Over at Tugxedo, I put in the same address, and got slightly different results. Among other things, it looks like the Tugxedo one picks up the names of the post authors (most of which are me!), so that shows up larger. And every time you try, you get different results.

Anyway, it’s fun to play with. Tagxedo lets you save the results as a file. Wordle only appears to let you upload to their gallery, but either way it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, innit?

The wonders of a Friday night with no show…

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