I referenced Wordle a few weeks back in our discussion on data visualization. If you missed the post, Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Simply paste in a bunch of text or enter a blog or del.icio.us URL/user name and presto, you’re done.

Lately I’ve been using the application quite a bit for presentation purposes, and also as a key word/theme analysis tool. To better understand my impact on the web, I created word clouds for the AP, my Twitter and delicious accounts. Not only are these word clouds visual representations of the topics/themes that interest me; they illustrate what I’m contributing back into the digital landscape.

To fully understand one’s own online identity, it’s necessary to see how others perceive it.