A word cloud or tag cloud is a cluster of words placed randomly on a “cloud” with different font sizes or colors. These words can from blogs, websites, tweets, or any given text. Usually, words that appear more frequently in the source text will be shown in a larger font size and different words can be shown in different colors. If you are a blogger, you may have already implemented word clouds on your blog and by doing that, readers can quickly view the most talked about topics on your blog or they can click on a topic that they are most interested. But most importantly, generating word clouds of your website or any give text can be a lot of fun. Here are 5 word cloud generators that will help you generate beautiful words clouds of any pages, websites, or your custom text.
1 Wordle
Wordle is probably one of the most popular websites to generate word clouds. You can either use your own custom text, or you can specify a URL of any blog, websites that has an RSS feed, or even a Delicious user name then you can tweak your clouds with various fonts, layouts, and color schemes. After generating, you can choose to print them out or you can save it to the Wordle gallery, where many people share their creative word clouds.
2 Tagxedo
Tagxedo will turn any words you provide, such as famous speeches, news, slogans etc into a visually stunning word cloud. You can make clouds into various shapes like hearts, circles or choose different layouts. Also there is a lot of fonts to choose from. After generating, you can save the cloud as PNG or JPG format. Tagxedo is a good tool to make more artistic looking word clouds.
3 WordItOut
WordItOut allows you to generate word clouds with a lot options. First, you enter the text, or web address that you want to make them into a word cloud and then it will generate a preset word cloud. If you are not happy with it, then scroll down the page and set what characters or words can be ignored from the cloud, the background colors, fonts, word size ranges, color blending of the words, color blending methods and more. Besides, if you find it boring to set things and just want to take a look at some randomly generated word clouds with your text, you can get it by hitting “random setting”. Once generated, you can easily embed it on any web page or blog.
4Tagcrowd
Tagcrow is a basic word could generator that allows you to generate word clouds from your entered text, or a web page URL or a file you uploaded. While it does not offer you options such as colors, fonts or layouts, it does allow you to see the frequency of words and it also lets you save the cloud as HTML or PDF format.
5Tagul
Tagul is a word cloud generator with a lot of features that other generators don’t have. For example, you can custom the shapes of your cloud in addition to selecting from their preset shapes, you can also use more than one fonts in one single cloud, you can manually edit tags by adding and deleting tags, editing an existing one using the font, color or angle or URL address you specify. After you finalize your word cloud, you can save it as PNG or SVG or get the code to place it on the web. Tagul requires a simple registration to use their service, but it is definitely worthwhile as no other cloud generators offer so many features.
