Tag Clouds help you quickly visualize the content of a website. The font size of a word or phrase in a tag cloud is almost always proportional to the frequency at which that particular topic is covered on the website.
Web 2.0 sites like del.icio.us and Flickr introduced us to the concept of “tag clouds” but we can extend the idea and use tag clouds to analyze long pieces of text like blog feeds, speech transcripts, SEC filings, patents, software end-user license agreements (EULA), website privacy policies, etc.
Here are some sample text clouds created using speech transcripts and blogs.
A More Perfect Union – by Senator Barack Obama
TechCrunch – Michael Arrington technology blog
Future of Application Development - Bill Gates (his last speech as Microsoft chairman)
Stanford Commencement Speech - Steve Jobs
I am Profoundly Sorry - Bill Clinton
I Have a Dream – by Martin Luther King, Jr
The above tag clouds are created with Wordle – one of the best tag cloud generators on the web developed by Jonathan Feinberg. The service also lets you change fonts, color schemes and even text orientation.
And Wordle is not just for generated tag clouds for your del.icio.us bookmarks, you can copy-paste any block of text and turn that into a beautiful tag cloud. Thanks Divya.
Related: Analyze Your Text Writing [Lexical Density]
