UK Fundraising front page as a Wordle

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Visualising information in a different and sometimes more useful way interests me, so I was pleased to come across the free Wordle tool developed by Jonathan Feinberg, a senior software engineer at IBM Research.

You can use it to build up a picture based on words of your choice. You can then colour the words, change the shape of the 'word cloud', choose whether the words appear vertically or horizontally, and choose from a range of fonts.

Now you can let Wordle create an image based on the words that appear on a blog page or any page that is published in RSS.

Here, for example, is UK Fundraising's Wordle taken a few minutes ago:

What are the fundraising implications? Well, none directly, but I can imagine some quite powerful and impressive Wordle's built from charities' web feeds or even the words of a charity's objects.

For example, here is Oxfam GB's press release feed interpreted as a Wordle:

An annual report front cover image? Or perhaps, like a tag cloud, an alternative method of browsing and exploring a website? Or, applied purely to fundraising, perhaps a public thank you to donors who have given recently online (and of course who have given their permission for their name to appear)? Perhaps major donors or regular donors' names appear larger, or perhaps a new donor's name gets pride of place?

I reckon there are some useful applications for fundraisers in this beautiful tool.

www.wordle.net