Wordle Blog

2009-11-04T10:10:00.005-05:00

This has nothing to with Wordle, but I don't know where else to say this:

I reject and abhor those who would deprive my fellow citizens of their equal status under the law. These people couch their bigotry and fear in carefully crafted bullshit.

It's time, once again, for the courts to stand for justice, and to strike down these outrageous laws, which deprive people of their rights.

Tagul

2009-09-21T10:21:00.002-04:00

Many folks have asked for a Wordle that fits into a shape. Others have asked for “clickable” Wordles, which could be used for navigation. I’m happy to say that someone (who identifies himself only as “Alex”) has created a service that meets both of those needs. I’m not endorsing his site; I’m just letting folks know about it.

Tagul: http://tagul.com/

It requires signing up with either a new Tagul account, or via some OpenID provider, so I can’t provide a demo here. As you might have guessed from the way Wordle works, I don’t like signing up for toys.

How to make Wordle safe for classroom use.

2009-08-21T13:06:00.005-04:00

A couple of days ago, I got an email from Becky Foellmer, of Lakeview Jr. High in Downers Grove, IL. She suggested:

Since it is very easy to set most networks to block specific sites, blocking the gallery at http://www.wordle.net/gallery is a simple process. That eliminates the concern of students seeing inappropriate content there. Then […] instead of having the latest examples showing on your homepage (which could easily contain inappropriate content), you could simply put up several samples of your choosing that are appropriate. This, I believe, would allow those of us in the field of education to much more comfortably utilize your site within our classrooms.

This seemed to me to strike an excellent balance, in that it’s something I actually have time to get done, and it’s practical for educators, I hope. Therefore, I’m happy to announce that from now on, the Wordle front page will never feature images or links that are inappropriate for classroom use. It's now possible to configure an institution's "site-blocking" software to keep Wordle safe for classroom use.

Simply have your networking administrator block the following base URLs¹:

http://www.wordle.net/gallery
http://www.wordle.net/next
http://www.wordle.net/random

and your users will not see anything that's not safe for classrooms. You’ll still be able to save your work, bookmark your individual Wordle creations, print them out, and share the URLs of saved Wordles with each other and with families.

Please let me know whether this works out for you in your school or other institution.

¹By "base URL" I mean: "block all URLs that begin with the given text", and not merely those literal URLs.

Aloha, Kaimuki

2009-06-10T12:36:00.002-04:00

I was delighted to see that Honolulu's Kaimuki Public Library is using Wordle as the basis for a weekly contest. What I particularly like is that nobody felt it necessary to explain what a Wordle is.

Be Creative: Play Wordle

My 5 Words of Fame

2009-06-09T22:07:00.003-04:00

As you may know, Wordle won both the Webby and the People's Voice Webby for Best Use of Typography at this year's Webby awards. In order to maximize their income from entrance fees and winner's tickets (many hundreds of dollars), they have an inordinate quantity of categories. They make a virtue of their scammy excesses by strictly limiting winners' speeches to 5 words.

Imagine my chagrin when the very first winner went up on stage and recited the 5-word address I'd planned.

This is the best I could do under time pressure. I'm not sure whether I ought to have had more to drink, or less.

Word Vader

2009-02-21T21:26:00.002-05:00

Word Vader

I was putting my son to bed, and I said, "I feel like writing a computer program, but I don't have any ideas," and he said, "make something that draws Star Wars characters with words," and I had most of the code for that kind of thing lying around, and here it is.

Wordles and the Inaugural Addresses

2009-02-02T20:14:00.001-05:00

In the days after the inauguration of #44, I saw many, many blog posts and newspaper stories featuring Wordles of the inaugural address. In my opinion, while they are lovely enough, they don’t really address what makes one person’s words distinctive. To see if I could do any better, I spent a couple of days making Comparisons of Inaugural Addresses.

Stimulus.

2009-01-20T23:24:00.002-05:00

In addition restoring the rule of law and implicitly repudiating torture, preemptive war, and being stupid on government property, Barack Obama has also driven an amazing amount of traffic to Wordle today.

Thanks, #44.

The Wordle-Users Google Group is Dead

2008-12-23T14:24:00.001-05:00

Long live the WordleUsers Google Group.

Unfortunately, the Google Groups administration interface does not permit you to delete any more than one post at a time, and there were hundreds of spam messages from before the moment when I turned on moderation. I have blown away the existing archive, which was too polluted by spam to be useful, and created a new group.

For Wordle users in the educational field

2008-12-13T15:56:00.002-05:00

I commend to you: mugs of authority. Excellent stocking-stuffer for yourself or for the harried middle-school teacher in your household.

via

Good Data

2008-12-08T11:14:00.002-05:00

Good data makes all the difference in a visualization. I snarfed the list of the most common New York Times crossword puzzle answers, massaged the data into a form that Wordle Advanced would understand, et voila:

A Wordle Lesson Plan

2008-10-27T10:03:00.001-04:00

Many teachers have written to me about their use of Wordle in the classroom. Miss Fran O’Leary, of the English & Media Studies department of Redruth School, UK, has kindly given me her permission to share with you her lively account of one such use. I quote:

You asked me, if I remembered, to feed back on my use of Wordle for spelling and vocabulary. I'd love to share the success, so here we go.

First time: hmmm, not sure that the students really knew what to make of it. They did OK, but no better than you would imagine.

Second time: I changed the test slightly. I told them to take the sheet home and use it in any way they wanted to 'learn the words'. I then tested their knowledge with questions such as:"only one of these words was longer than 9 letters, which one was it?", "choose any word you like, but it must be spelled 100% correctly", "which word has the most vowels?" The results were still OK, but nothing amazing.

Third time: they asked if it would be like the second one; I said yes but without the 100% spelling thing. They blew me away with the test results. OK, not everyone answered all ten questions, but of the questions answered there were only 4 spelling mistakes; some incorrect answers, but they had spelled the chosen words correctly anyway.

Fourth time: similar positive result.

Fifth time: again, superb on the spelling front and yet I had long stopped asking them to 'spell'. Plus, this time the last of the hardcore "I ain't doing it" students had a go and surprised us both.

And so on...

I'm still puzzling as to the exact reasons why this method has been so successful in engaging students with new vocabulary, but I've come to the conclusion that it's a combination of: the vocabulary sheet allowing more interaction through physical turning and handling; colours allowing associations or categories to be formed; and testing for understanding and exploration rather than technical accuracy. Then again, it could just be as simple as the explanation given by one of the girls "it's kinda pretty and it's different. You like to use things like that, don't ya?"

Wordle Advanced

2008-10-27T09:57:00.002-04:00

Many users have asked for a way to use Wordle as sort of an output device for more sophisticated text analyses, so I give you Wordle Advanced.

There you'll find a couple of forms for pasting your word-weight data. One form also expects colors, as hex numbers. So now, if you've done, say, a Dunning log-likelihood analysis of some text versus a normative corpus, you can get a Wordle of the result, and you could even assign your own colors based on parts of speech, or relative frequency within the source document, what have you.

Use in good health.

Interview about Wordle

2008-09-25T14:59:00.001-04:00

I recently had the pleasure to do a 35 minute interview about how I came to make Wordle, and then the even greater pleasure to hear it edited down to a fairly concise 6 minutes or so. I'm pleased with it for a couple of reasons: 1) she used an excellent Church of Betty song to frame the interview, and 2) I got to speak my mind about the principles that ought to inform software design, but so rarely do.

"Can I have a Wordle with you?" (at ibm.com)

100,000 Wordles

2008-08-01T06:55:00.001-04:00

While I slept, some kind soul with the handle "Gordorca" created the 100,000th Wordle.

Thank you, Wordle users.

Announcement: Wordle Users' group

2008-07-23T12:37:00.000-04:00

I have create a Google group for Wordle users.

Wordle Users on Google Groups

I invite all of you to use it as a place to talk to each other about Wordle, to ask for help, and to give help from your own experience. I'll be reading the group and responding as I can.

Get BIGGER

2008-07-08T15:31:00.000-04:00

You may now "pop out" the Wordle applet into its own resizable window. This means you can take a really big screen shot. Or you can just look at a really big Wordle. Knock yourself out.

2008-07-07T16:22:00.001-04:00

You may now choose your own colors. Wordle has now become awesome, as far as I’m concerned.

Simply Barbra

2008-07-01T09:32:00.002-04:00

Thank you, Isabel2203.

barbra's all songs

Stop! Words.

2008-06-30T20:06:00.001-04:00

As promised, I have redone Wordle’s handling of so-called “stopwords”, words that are too common to visualize in most cases. Now, when you give Wordle some text, it does its best to figure out what language the text is in, and hides the stopwords for that language. Of course, as before, you can ask Wordle not to remove common words, via the “Language” menu.

I still need stopwords for Hebrew, Nepali, and (of course) many other languages. Please let me know, dear Wordle users, if you can scrape up these or any others that I’ve missed.

Make Wordles of Blogs

2008-06-30T12:56:00.001-04:00

One of the more frequently requested features has been “Let me just paste the URL of a blog, so I can make a Wordle of the contents.” Because I don’t want to do any fetching or parsing of XML on the Wordle server side, I haven’t been able to implement this. However, our friends at the Google have done all of the hard work for me: The Google AJAX Feed API

So, now, you can enter the URL of anything that either is a feed (RSS or Atom), or has a feed, and Wordle will fetch all of the text it can get right there in your browser, and fire up a Wordle.

Thank you, the Google.

I wish I could remove stars from certain feature requests.

2008-06-27T15:50:00.001-04:00

The top four feature requests in Google App Engine’s issue tracker:

please add java or groovy support
PHP support is a must
Please add ruby support
Add Perl support

While it’s a matter of taste to prefer one language over another, these are real head-scratchers for me. I can’t understand why the folks who have starred these issues don’t simply learn Python and start creating internet-scale apps. What are they waiting for? What are they afraid of?

The problem with those feature requests is that to implement them would take development, documentation, and QA time away from improving the existing stuff.

I know that the GAE developers pay attention to “star power” in their issue tracker, but I hope that this class of requests will be dismissed with prejudice.

New layout options

2008-06-27T12:26:00.001-04:00

The “Layout” menu now lets you choose the overall shape of the Wordle cloud: straight(er) or round(er) edges. These shapes become especially apparent in Wordles with many words, more than a couple hundred. Play with the new settings, and see what you like.

One good strategy is to wail on the new “Randomize” button, which will automaticaly apply new color, font, and layout settings.

Remember that you can undo everything you do. It’s safe to try things, even if you have a layout you like.

Other settings you may have missed: maximum words, prefer alphabetical order. These have a profound impact on the result.

Now with less cholesterol

2008-06-26T12:07:00.001-04:00

I’ve spent a couple of hours in the kind of numerical tweaking that visualization programmers do a lot of. You wind up with many mysterious double-precision constants floating around your core layout routines, and you might not remember how you came to them, or why they’re there. If you’re a “software engineer”, like me, you’ll remember that it’s bad to have random numeric constants in your code, so you’ll replace them with named constants. On the other hand, the constants wind up with names like “SMUDGE_FACTOR”, “TWEAKISHNESS”, and “RHO”.

But anyway, my aim was to make Wordles a little less egg-shaped, especially high-density ones, with many words. It was hard to balance that desire with the requirement to keep the words fairly tightly packed, and I’m not sure I’m quite there yet. Now some of the Wordles take on rather a kidney shape, which is certainly no better. I’m working on it.

Things to come

2008-06-25T10:14:00.001-04:00

For the curious, here are the improvements I’m most likely to make in the coming weeks.

Completely rewrite Wordle’s handling of “stop words”, common words that, for most uses, should not appear in the visualization. Currently, there one huge list. There needs to be a separate list for each language (easy) and Wordle needs to make a heuristic guess as to which language is in use (harder).
Custom palettes.
“Next”, “Previous”, and “Random” buttons on the wordle-viewing page.

There are other design problems I’m aware of—no search!? no [insert your favorite language here]!?—and I’ll get to them as soon as I’m able.

Please keep your emails coming. They’ve been critical in showing me where the flaws lie.