By DAN MASON
For years, Wordle has been an unsung hero of presenters, report illustrators and journalists looking to pick out the keywords of important speeches in a visually interesting way.
But the online tool does has its limitations. So it was inevitable someone would take a great idea and give it the spinning bowtie treatment (and make money).
Enter Tagxedo (pronounced like tuxedo, which is why, I read, its strapline is ‘tag cloud with styles’).
Like Wordle, it’s a piece of cake to use. But it has a few tricks up its sleeve …
… like creating a tag cloud from your tweets or a website URL; fitting your cloud into a shape or uploaded image; building your own colour theme, and saving your finished image as a JPEG or PNG in a variety of sizes. I also really like the ability to control the density and ‘emphasis’ – relative size of words – within the cloud.
The inauguration address of Jonathan Goodluck, President of Nigeria (pictured wearing his trademark hat), seemed a suitable opportunity to try out two of the best things about Tagxedo – the option to upload an image and embed the completed word cloud.
Here’s the result, in custom green and white (Nigeria’s national colours), complete with neat mouseover effect. (You may need to install Microsoft Silverlight).
It would be nice if the embed code was available for all to share, and that public clouds could be searchable on the Tagxedo site. But maybe later …
Tagxedo is still in beta phase, so if you want to try out the bells and whsitles (like uploading your own image) jump in before premium pricing kicks in. Use of Tagxedo images for personal, non-profit and educational use is free under Creative Commons licence.
I like it. What could YOU do with Tagxedo?
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