海角大神

Shake-and-bake word collage

|
Image by Wordle and inspired by Reuters
A Wordle collage of President Bush's speech today on the coming G8 meeting.

Here鈥檚 one of those fun, quasi-pointless websites that can quickly gobble up your time. is an online app that turns paragraphs into art.

It tears apart sentences and sprinkles the text into visual word clouds, with the most frequently used words taking up the most space.

The process is surprisingly easy: Paste in some text 鈥 a journal entry, famous speech, term paper 鈥 and click "Go." The algorithm does all the heavy lifting and has a surprisingly clever artistic eye. After Wordle assembles your text collage, you can add your own touches. Fiddle with the font. Adjust the alignment. Correct the colors. Or just hit 鈥渞andomize鈥 for a complete do-over.

If you need to justify this huge time-waster to a friend or employer, there are some useful applications, even if they are very unscientific. Since the program emphasizes words that are used more often, playing with Wordle can measure the depth of your vocabulary 鈥 鈥淥h dear, I use 鈥榣ike鈥 way too much鈥 鈥 reveal hidden biases 鈥 鈥淐learly that Chris Gaylord blogs about Google far too frequently鈥 鈥 or use it as an artistic alternative to spreadsheets and pie charts 鈥 鈥淪ee boss, I was doing work after all.鈥

Up above, I've posted a word collage of President Bush's speech today on the G8 meeting and another on my 15 most recent blog posts.

[Via ]

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
QR Code to Shake-and-bake word collage
Read this article in
/Technology/Horizons/2008/0702/shake-and-bake-word-collage
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
/subscribe