Wordle

I know I haven't written in a while! I will again soon. But first, I wanted to bring your attention to a cool Web site that my graduate assistantship (GA) adviser, Mark, showed me yesterday: www.wordle.net. The site allows you to paste text in a box and it randomizes it for you in a word cloud to show you the most used words. You can also put a link in to any Web site with an RSS feed (like a blog) and see the most used words there, too. Of course, I couldn't resist. Here are the word clouds for each of my three blogs:

Wonder of Now (this blog):




London Holiday (study abroad experience in London):




For His Renown (attempted blog when I went to the Urbana and Passion conferences in 2006):


Go check it out! And, if you want to see any of these clouds in detail, just click on the picture. You'll be able to read all of the words.

Mark and I were thinking that this could be a cool way to analyze primary source documents in the classroom. He ran the Obama and McCain convention speeches through Wordle and it was really neat to see visually what words they both focus on. Any thoughts on that?