A Valentine's Gift for L. Straube

Providing something to play with on your day off! Another word cloud tool which allows for a bit more customization: WordItOut.
It uses a different technology than Wordle, and so can offer several advantages, such as leaving out words, a direct URL and an embed feature. Your word cloud can be private or public. Firefox is the recommended browser.

Read: a comparison of Wordle and WordItOut.

Clusty Clouds

Today on Gary Price's Reference Shelf, I found the Clusty Cloud Creator which is
a tool that webmasters or bloggers can use to instantly visualize a topic using the familiar tag cloud display. You can create a cloud based on any topic or query which
are generated using our search results for the topic you enter. The nice part is that you can click on any of them to go to Clusty's search results which are generated in real-time.

HTML code is generated if you want to put the Clusty Cloud on a blog or web page. You can also customize the look of your Clusty Cloud to match your site or topic. I see the potential use of this to help students select alternate keyword searches. See the cloud I created for global warming:

Loading Clusty Cloud ...