Words with style

From Roo’s del.icio.us stream, I came across Wordle by IBM Research’s Jonathan Feinberg.

It is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide”. The results it produces are absolutely stunning. Tag clouds are quite a common thing these days - it would take a couple clicks to add one in the sidebar of this blog. But they are often quite dull. Wordle shows this doesn’t have to be the case.

The site lets you specify a list of words to generate the cloud from, or it will do it from your del.icio.us tags. You can see my tags in the cloud above.

At the moment it is a java applet - but it would be great to see it run as a web service so these clouds can be integrated more readily.