Tonight, I just sat it on a web journalist chat on Twitter. The chats go on every Wednesday at 7 p.m. CT. They involve web journalists from around the world who look at how online journalism works. The monitor brings up questions, and the people sitting in respond. I thought this would be a very informative thing for me to sit in on because I do not know a whole lot about social media, but as people always say, there is always time to learn.
The topic tonight seemed to be about word clouds. I got a bad vibe from the journalists weighing in on the website Wordle. It seemed like most of them didn't like it. This also...was the first question of the night. You'd figure that they'd throw up a couple of softballs first, but if they did, I couldn't even hit this one. I don't know what word clouds are. So being the young and brave reporter that I am...instead of faking it like I knew all about it, I decided to ask what it was. I got a lot of people to respond to me. The biggest concern among the journalists was that Wordle can be changed very easily, and it is a bit misleading. In other words, the clouds it creates might make some words look like they appear more often than they really do.
I went to the Wordle website, but I was never able to create one myself. I don't think my computer had the most up to date Java software. From the website though, it appears as though Wordle makes clouds out of the words you provide. Bigger clouds are made to words that appear more often on-line. The bigger the word, the more prevalent it is on-line. What's lost in this, I also could have figured out what Wordle was by looking at the tweets that followed mine. After answering the question, a bunch of different people responded to me. It seemed as if they were eager to help me out. Some of the conversation from my short chat is below. My next on-line goal...create a Wordle. Sounds like a good task.
What do you think about Wordle? Leave me a comment!
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