Omnivorous Surfer: Tagul and Wordle

Tagul and Wordle

Posted in Labels: Education, web applications, website links, word cloud | at 4:35 PM

Tagul is a FREE online app which will build a tag cloud using your own word list. The size of each word in the cloud is determined by its "weight," the number of times it appears in the list. Mouse-over a word, and it zooms to the front as a link. The Tagul default link is to a Google search for the word, but that can be changed. The process is far easier, though, if you use the default. In this case, a picture (well, flash movie) really is worth a thousand words, so here is a cloud I created in a cloud shape (also available are heart, four-pointed star, triangle, five-pointed star, circle and rectangle) with all words horizontal.

Tagul clouds are flash objects which can be imbeded on a web page, as this one is. I like them as a different way to present links for navigation.

Another FREE site, Wordle, is a bare-bones cloud creator without shape options or link capabilities, but it does produce a nice cloud very simply. A Wordle cloud can be printed or viewed on the wordle site. To use a cloud as an images requires capturing a screen shot and trimming it. A number of the clouds shown in the gallery were created by students. If you should decide to use it in the classroom, however, you will probably want to read "How to make Wordle safe for classroom use."

I think tag clouds would be a different way to graphically present typical bar-chart data where more precise relationships are not critical. It would be a fun way for students to enter poll or survey data (words) and see the results. Wordle would probably be better suited to this application, since Tagul's links would not be needed and might, in fact, be in the way. Wordle is also somewhat easier to use.

Read Users' Comments (0)