Tag clouds don’t normally hold my interest for more than, say, 6 seconds. But this app got me for a whole ten minutes! That is how long it took to create the most artistic tag cloud I have ever seen! Tagxedo is a beautiful, graphically-oriented, tag cloud generator that offers amazing controls and design-y features. Right now the service is in beta and all features are free, but creator Hardy Leung promises a premium version with even higher quality (hard to imagine – the quality is top-notch right now).  At this point, you can save the image as a .JPG or .PNG, which is a bit unfortunate as the animated image on the web interface increases the tag size as you hover in a visually pleasing way.

Tag clouds organize words into shapes and their size symbolizes their overall importance or frequency within the text that serves as the basis for the cloud. They are a great visual representation of text in our increasingly visual world. Tagxedo will create a cloud from any document or website you feed into it and will omit the little connectors like is, the, if, etc. Hardy’s tool even lets you upload an image and use that image to define the tag cloud.

Hardy uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology to get the job done and I think his work is a stunning endorsement of it! Check out my (unfortunately) un-animated tag cloud created from my Twitter stream above, and head on over to have some fun creating your own (link here).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Check Out Tagxedo, A Ridiculously Cool Word Cloud Generator (techcrunch.com)
• From the Dissipation of the Tag Cloud to Twitter Ad MI (tpgblog.com)
• TagCrowd – make your own tag cloud from any text (newtrierlibrary.blogspot.com)