A Little Unexpected Fun with Words

Just about everyone who spends time online will encounter a technology, have a positive reaction to it, and only later find the words to describe it. That happened to me yesterday with the Wordle site at http://www.wordle.net.

I came across a Boston Globe article that graphically compared the words used by the blogs for Senators Obama and McCain. The graphic compared the words used by each site, with the size of the word corresponding to the number of times it was used. The most popular word on both sites was Obama, but that was not why I'm writing this. The site mentioned that the graphics came from the Wordle web site, so I followed it and discovered that it allows anyone to do what the Boston Globe did to any web site or blog, and even to a block of text. Just for kicks, I input the entire content of "Parenting and the Internet" and got the following result for the 100 most frequently used words in the book:



After I played around with the site, I did a bit of research and found out that what I had created was a word cloud, which is a visual depiction of frequently used words on a web site, blog, web page, or other document. It illustrates the relative frequency of words by using font size. The more often a word appears, the larger the word appears in the word cloud

I'll have to admit that I only bothered to find out the definition after I spent some time playing around with Wordle. I suggest that you do the same and visit the site at http://www.wordle.net. It's free, it's fun, and it's with a little bit of your time.