How to Create Word Clouds
Trent Blizzard | 27 February 2009 | 8 Reviews »
Word Clouds, also known as ”tag clouds” and “keyword clouds” are a unique and powerful visual depiction of words.
You can create artsy tag clouds at Wordle. Here is word cloud created when Wordle looked at our homepage (on Feb 25th)
There are a few handy features to Wordle:
- You can paste or type in the words you want to use, or, wordle can grab them from a RSS feed
- There is a randomize button that lets you cycle through dozens of different themes to find one you like.
- You cans save your Wordle’s to a Wordle Gallery.
Here was the original Word Cloud I made for an article posted yesterday in the blog about Dirty hotels. I was reading the reviews of the 10 dirtiest hotels according to Tripadvisor. Each review was worst than the last… so, I cut and pasted the reviews into Wordle to see what a tag cloud of bad reviews look like:
Please share your own home-made word clouds in our comments below!
Some examples of others using Word clouds:
Techcrunch uses Wordle for Terms of Service Visualizations
Barak Obama Speech Visualization
Wordcast Tagcloud
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February 28th, 2009 at 8:17 am
Thank you very much for the tips. It was very helpful and informative.
March 2nd, 2009 at 11:20 am
This is an informative post about Wordle. I think it is entertaining, with all the words written in every direction.
March 2nd, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Trent, I was a little confused here! What’s the different between “Tag Cloud” and “Keywords”?
March 3rd, 2009 at 11:39 pm
I have never heard of, much less seen a Word Cloud….interesting and artistic endeavor. I suspect however, that if this caught on too much, that it would probably cause wrinkles in Googles Primary Keyword Assessment Algorithm.
Frank
March 4th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Wilson,
It can be a tag cloud, word cloud or keyword cloud. They are all “clouds” of words … “tags” are certain type of keyword popularly used in many blogs and social media resources (find out more about tags at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata). So, really the difference is what the source is for the words that make the cloud. People often build their cloud out of their “tags”, out of their “keywords” or out of general “words.” I guess you can pick tag/keyword/word as you wish for your clouds.
I personally used all three in this post, mainly for search engine reasons… I would like my post to come up in searches for “tag cloud” “word cloud” or “keyword cloud” so I used all three throughout the post. If is wasn’t concerned about getting search engine traffic, I would have called it “word clouds” exclusively.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Does tag clouds serves any SEO purpose ?
November 10th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
I am a high school art teacher. word clouds would be a great class project. Wordle is great but it is limited, print comes out very broken not crisp and the size is small also. Are there any programs I can purchase or download free to use in my classroom that do the same or similar as Wordle? thanks
February 1st, 2010 at 11:09 pm
It’s a very nice tutorial .It is very useful to create word clouds.
thanks.