First, let’s answer the question that many of you are probably asking, “What the heck is a world cloud?”   A word cloud is a cluster of words placed randomly on a “cloud” pulled from the text of any blog, twitter feed, website and more.  Your personalized cloud  gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

A great site to create your word cloud is Wordle.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Why create a word cloud?

Let’s look at a few reasons…

-It’s a lot of FUN! And It’s FREE!

-Word clouds are a great way to see what your main focus has been with your blog or website.

-You can use the word clouds you create as background images for your website or twitter page.

-Wordle allows you to be creative and make some really colorful and artistic word clouds.

-Gives your readers an idea of what the focus words are of your blog or website.

-The word cloud is unique, there won’t be another exactly like yours.

You can see my word cloud at the top of this post. I also have a word cloud in my main image banner.

How do you do it you ask?

Go on Wordle.net click create and do one of the following:

-Copy and past a bunch of text into the box.

-Enter the URL of your website that has an RSS feed.

-Type in your direct RSS feed.

-Enter a del.icio.us user name.

After doing one of the above, click the go or submit button and sit back and wait for the magic to happen. After it creats your cool cloud you can then edit if from the top menu bar selections Language, Font, Layout and Color.

Try it yourself and see what comes up. I had a lot of fun with this, I’m sure you will too!

GIVE IT A TRY & HAVE FUN!