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wordle: endless meme potential

I've been playing around with Wordle a bit this weekend. Wordle is cool - you dump in any text and it essentially creates a tag cloud. You can tweak the layout, font and colours from a pre-defined set.

I found Wordle via Lachlan's flickr post, who in turn was responding to a meme proposed by Anson: Cool Tool - Wordle - Anson Parker's Phase Two Blog.

Thanks to my English Russia linkdump the other day, this blog's Wordle didn't work all that well ;) But I've been thinking of a few other fun things you could do with Wordle:

  • Grab the lyrics to the album you're currently listening to; or your favourite album.
  • Compare the transcripts of political speeches or hansard
  • Compare the homepages of various media outlets
  • Grab the first page of results from Google for something you're interested in (you might like to remove "cached" and "similar pages" first)

Here are some examples...

Paul Keating's Redfern speech:
wordle - redfern speech

Kevin Rudd's Sorry speech:
wordle - sorry speech

The first page of Google if you search for 'web standards':
wordle: google results for web standards

Lyrics to the album Empires by VNV Nation:
'wordle:

I reckon the album lyrics are the most fun. So, if you feel like a bit of meme fun...

Meme: Find the lyrics to the album you are listening to (or the one you listened to most recently). Select all and copy them. Go to Wordle and create your Wordle. Then post the results and comment on the post where you found this meme. Everyone's welcome to join in; nobody is 'tagged' with obligation to participate.

Or, just do it for fun and forget all the posting and commenting crap ;)

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around the traps