Tagxedo ‘turns words — famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters — into a visually stunning tag cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.’
Earlier this year, I wrote a blogpost about Tagul which was a clever iteration of the word cloud generator Wordle. Tagxedo takes the interactive flavour of Tagul and adds a really nice feature to it – customisable images. The ability to upload images to use as the shape for your word clouds is really compelling and I was pleased with how easy it was to tweak the parameters to get a really identifiable graphic for my Tagxedo’s text (Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson – see below).
I loved the number of options with layout, font, colour and shape. Everything is there.
Also, the opportunity to bring up all the history of all tweaks was brilliant – it is very easy to go back to an earlier experiment.
It should be noted that Tagxedo is done in Silverlight which isn’t used as commonly as Flash or Java, but I found the app ran really smoothly (NB: I already had Silverlight installed).
Tagxedo allows you to save your work by submitting to the site. All the features are free in the Beta – it’ll be interesting to see how it goes when the app moves out of this stage.