We are all familiar with Tag Clouds on blogs… The more a particular topic gets written about in a blog, the larger its size is, relative to the size of other tags. Its really a clever representation of the metadata of a blog, a nice visual summary, if you like.

Wordle.net is a word cloud creation software written by Jonathan Feinberg. The basic idea behind this software is to key in a bunch of words, specify color, font and layout options and a visually appealing word cloud is generated. You are free to use the word cloud in any which way you desire. Looking at the default color and font themes, it is easy to guess that t-shirt designs was among the main uses Jonathan had in mind when creating this.

There is also a Gallery section which allows people to showcase their beautiful creations on the website. Its a good idea to go through these to get ideas and to help you with your own creative process.

Interestingly, the use of this software has gone beyond the initial purpose the author had in mind. He has received numerous inquiries from teachers and those in the education field for permission to use this software as an educational tool. This naturally came with requests to have some form of censorship, as currently the content in the Gallery is not moderated. Quite unsurprisingly, this is not an easy to do task, since at the time of writing his software gets about 3 Wordle generation requests per minute.

If you do not have a bunch of text you can think of immediately, some of the things you could do is paste in an entire chapter of an ebook to see which are the words which are repeated more often (they will have a larger relative size). Or better still, Wordle supports RSS feeds, which means all you have to do is key in the path to the RSS feed your favorite blog and it will automagically generate a beautiful word cloud from the contents of that blog.

The fonts used in the system are not only pretty to look at, they also support international character sets. Therefore, its possible to use the system out of the box with other character sets such as Arabic, Devanagri and Hebrew.

So, what are you waiting for, head over to Wordle.net and unleash your creative genius!