Local Media Watch

A new word cloud generator is on the scene (via TechCrunch) called Tagxedo.

Word clouds were all the rage a couple of years ago as one of the iconic symbols of Web 2.0. blogs and social bookmarking tools everywhere were including tag clouds to show the relative prominence of words or categories throughout their pages.

Wordle then joined the scene to offer a do-it-yourself word cloud generator: Anyone could type in a URL (perfect for a blog), and get a word cloud back in seconds. It’s since become a marketing tool, and PowerPoint fodder in “about us” slides. Cheesy as it may sound, it’s a good way to get a quick glimpse of any given blog or site.

Now a bigger and badder word cloud generator comes along. Tagxedo has AJAX buttons to modify word clouds on the fly and toggle shapes, fonts colors and all kinds of other options. Below is one I made for this blog in about 4 seconds.

It’s the first one that popped up, but in the way of StumbleUpon or Urbanspoon, you can also hit a button to shake up all of the above options and spit out a randomly styled word cloud for your site. Hours of fun (OK, maybe minutes). Check it out here.

tag

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Thanks for the positive review of Tagxedo. One clarification, Tagxedo is not cloud-based. Instead, all number crunching happens on the client side which is, that’s right, your computer! This way, the respin can be much faster than what is achievable with AJAX, despite the massive number crunching required to generate the stunning clouds.

    For audience not sure about whether Tagxedo is worth it, check out the gallery http://www.tagxedo.com/gallery.html

    — Hardy Leung (ksleung@tagxedo.com)

Leave a Reply

Back To Top