Wordle

Today I played around with a web app called Wordle (see my attempts at Wordle linked here ). I hadn't heard of this particular page before, but I've definitely seen these "word clouds" in other places. I figured when I saw those that they must have taken awhile to make and place. I had no idea there was something out there that could take the words I wrote in a box (or on a blog) and turn it into wonderful looking art. Being an English teacher, I always see literature as art, but now to see a blog or even a resume as art is something that I can totally get on board for.

In a culture where brevity is fast becoming the norm, it's not completely outlandish for something like Wordle to be the future of things like resumes. One thing I noticed was that the things that were mentioned a number of times appeared bigger than the other words. So someone could describe themselves using a few "big" words and use the smaller words to complement those. Something like wordle really shows how keeping it short and sweet can still make a big impact. If you can explain what you are doing or how your day is going in 140 characters, why wouldn't it be reasonable to make something that looks good and sells yourself with just words. However, this might open up a weird can of worms where maybe the person looking at the wordle doesn't like blue and so glosses over looking at a wordle that uses a lot of blue. I could see how this could work either way.

I always tell my students that a resume should never be more than a page long and sometimes students have a hard time fitting everything that they think makes them hireable in one page. Imagine if you could put whatever you wanted into one wordle. It would be interesting to say the least.

To end this post, here is a link to what this blog posting looks like if it were a wordle. I think you could get the gist of my blog posting from it.