< Back to Blog

2 Comments

Wordle

JA November 12

Wordle has been around for a while now, but I recently came across it again via Cory Doctorow’s blog, craphound.com.

The site is basically an open program that allows you to create ‘word clouds’ out of a block of text (you can copy and paste direct, or simply use the URL to a webpage/RSS feed). The image is calculated in a histogram style, so words that appear more frequently are larger and vice-versa.

It’s certainly fun to play around with (and Spike may have got a little carried away with the images below), but another interesting aspect is creator Jonathan Feinberg’s decision to make all images available under creative commons. Basically:

You may take a Wordle, put it on your book cover, your t-shirt, your campaign poster, what have you. You may get rich off it. Just tell people how you made the image, or, if you're using one from the gallery, where you got it.

One of Doctorow’s readers mashed up a cover for his book Little Brother and it doesn’t look half bad (he managed to make the title and author name take prominence by making them appear over a thousand times). He suggested that Doctorow use it as cover art for his freely available ebooks. Perhaps something to think about for anyone who is game enough to self-publish, or follow in the footsteps of Doctorow’s freemium experiment.