The aim of ‘Thing #7’ is to have some fun with Wordle, the tag cloud generator.

 A tag cloud is a visual depiction of topics (tags) on a website. Tag clouds are usually single words displayed in different fonts and colours to show the importance of each tag. The size of the text is reflected in the amount of times the word is used in the text box. If you use a word several times the size of that word will be bigger than words that appear less frequently.

Tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a related content so the choice of tags used is important and should clearly represent your topics and target audience.

Websites such as Flickr use tag clouds to enable users to find other images related to the tag. Users can see hot tags from the last 24 hours and the most popular tags of all time.

Task  – Create a tag cloud using Wordle

1. Go to the Wordle website: http://www.wordle.net

2. Click on ‘Create’

3. In the ‘Paste in a bunch of text’ section, type in as many words as you can that relate to your experience of 23 Things so far. To prevent two or more words being separated in the image, put the ~ (tilde character) between words that go together

4. Click on ‘Go’

5. Play around with the different formatting options available (Edit, Font, Layout and Colour)

6. Click ‘Save to public gallery’

7. Give the tag cloud a title and username, then click on OK

8. Copy the code displayed at the bottom of the page, and paste it in your blog along with your views on using tag clouds.

Read the FAQ section to read more about how to add the tag cloud image to your blog.

Internet librarian, Phil Bradley, also recommends Tagxedo, so you may like to play with that too