Wordle.net: Using tag visualization for interest insight

If you want to know more about what I'm interested in, check out the links I've bookmarked on delicious.com. The visualization on the right comes from the fun tag cloud tool at www.wordle.net. Wordle provides tag clouds for lists of words, web pages, or delicious.com tags. Once the initial tag cloud is created, you can play with the format until you get a visualization that you like. You can then save it into the gallery.

There is a wordle blog ("News" in the banner) which highlights some of the interesting ways you can use wordle - from printing on mugs to using to teach spelling in a classroom. For all the fun you can have with wordle, there are a few shortcomings: Once you save a tag cloud, you cannot manipulate it further. You have to go back to the beginning if you want to create multiple versions of a tag cloud. So, if you are making tag clouds from a list of words, you need to re-enter that list for each tag cloud you generate. There is a search, but it isn't readily available from the home page. You can find it by going into the gallery, though. While you can save your wordles into a specified gallery (mine is called Laura Lee Dooley), you can't: create a user account or profile, comment on another's tag cloud, rate different wordles, or save your favorite wordles to your account (since you can't create one to begin with). Having said that, wordle was created by Jonathan Feinberg in his spare time and was never meant to be a social media site - but I can't help imagine how much more valuable it would be if some of the standard social media elements were added . . .