Tagxedo, an excellent Wordle alternative

One of the disadvantages of Web 2.0 resources is that sometimes they go down - pretty much the same with anything else in fact, but that's often used as a stick to beat all of the resources with. However, what people are not always quite so quick to mention is that other people see the need/desire for the product and will see if they can produce something themselves, hopefully better than the original. We have here a really great resource:Tagxedo - Tag Cloud with Styles.  It does what you would expect, but it does it very stylishly.

There's a lot of flexibility over colours, themes, fonts and directions. Users can also change shapes, aspect ratios, tightness of the words - no more ridiculous orphan words - skip words and so on. However, it's also possible to upload you own images or shapes and different fonts - tag clouds in your own handwriting perhaps? (Though you'd obviously need to create the font first).

Another really nice feature that I've tried to bring out in the screenshot is that the words can move as you mouseover them. They flip horizontal and fly out. This is going to be a great aid to teachers, who want to work through a tag cloud slowly for example. Microsoft Silverlight is needed in order to see the words 'dance', but you may well have that installed already.

Tagxedo has just become my word cloud maker of preference. Only one question - how on earth am I supposed to pronounce it?

This is the main work screen, using words from one of my webpages (no cut and pasting of a word page any longer!), with the word 'Advanced' that's flown out to the front for me. You can see the menu on the left.

Comments

[Sarah Pearson]

I can't believe how 3D that tag cloud looks!But I couldn't get anything to flip or move I'm afraid.
Pronounciation? As much like Tuxedo as you can get it? Tagzeedo perhaps?

[Hardy K. S. Leung]

Phil, thanks for the kind words! A few clarification. First of all, Tagxedo sounds similar to Tuxedo, the formal attire. Just replace the "Tux" sound with "Tag".

Second, regarding user fonts. Users can load any fonts in TTF and OTF formats (or zipped versions) to Tagxedo. This is not limited to your own fonts; you can use most every fonts from FontSquirrel.com (and other sites). Of course, different fonts are subject to different licensing requirements and they must be honored. Good news is that many are actually free for personal use, and some are free for all use or in public domain.

Currently there are still some kinks to be worked out (for example, the "Advanced" or "Skip words..." menus are not working at this moment), but I'll fix them as soon as I can.

If anyone has any feedback please send to [email protected]

Thanks again for your kind words!

[Phil Bradley]

If you can't get anything to move Sarah, you need to have Microsoft Silverlight installed. It's at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/ in case you're interested.

I've asked the creator of the product to drop by and tell us how he pronounces it. :)

[jim]

Hi, I love your blog and have learned about a lot of cool things reading it.

I can't seem to get it to work? I have tried to type some works in and it takes forever to load. I will keep playing with it and figure out what I am doing wrong.

Jim

[Phil Bradley]

Hi Jim, if you're having problems, I'd suggest that you contact the creator - very cool guy and happy to assist. He'll probably be able to work out what's wrong.