Cloudgazing, or What's in a Wordle?

Even if you don't know what a word cloud is, you've probably seen them. It's a visual organization of words based on their prominence within a text. Sometimes, they're even used to show the popularity of a topic on websites.

Now, with Wordle , you can make your own. After you copy and paste whatever text you'd like to display into the box, just hit GO. Once you've got a cloud made, you can decide whether you want all horizontal word arrangements, vertical, any-which-way, various color themes, and fonts. However, if you don't feel like exercising that much fine-tuning, keep pasting and hitting GO until you churn up something randomly fabulous.

Tagcrowd, to which our Laura first introduced me, is a similar program offering more selectivity within the text, such as omitting common words like 'and', or allowing you to link to a site which has the text you want to use, not simply copying and pasting. However, tagcrowd doesn't seem to have as many graphical alternatives for how the final word cloud appears.

The image above is from Wordle's view of my latest silly short story. I pasted all 13,500 words. Since it's romance-y, the greatest prominence is shown in the characters and the physical choreography of their dance toward each other and then apart and then closer still. Hmmm, I'm surprised the words throbbing and heaving didn't show up larger.

In either case, if you're trying to avoid actual writing, or perhaps to discover hidden themes and trends in your WIP, staring at clouds is a heck of a good time.
Go cloud gazing!