Image by Ricardo Carreon via Flickr

During my usual roaming about of the interwebs, I stumbled across this rather fascinating totally free “web service” which popped up on one of my RSS alerts. It’s a much more interesting take on creating word clouds. Now that might sound a tad boring at first but not when it looks as artistic as some of the creations this site’s engine manages to produce.

Simply head to Wordle.net and the site gives you three options. Either copy and paste or type your own text into the provided text box, enter in a URL of a website or enter in your del.icio.us username to see the tags on your account. Hit create and instantly a random design taking words from what you entered or the site or the username and it’ll create a random jpeg which is totally customizable.

What the BBC news website got converted to 

You can tell it to remove items such as common words in the English language to avoid having a picture of the’s and a’s and also customize what font it’s displayed in. Mind you, it’s no ordinary list of fonts so you won’t be stuck with looking at Comic Sans MS throughout. You can also change the layout to suit your preference and a number of preset and custom colour schemes. Or if you want some inspiration, hit randomize and it’ll do all of that for you.

You can come up with some pretty awesome looking backdrops, but why is this more than just a procrastination tool? Well by taking a screen capture of the image, it’ll allow you to turn into into a neat little wallpaper for your desktop. For a less clustered version, it could suit your mobile device wallpaper. For webmasters, it could look pretty sweet on the backdrop of a webpage. If you’re into advertising, you could post this as a logo or under advertising space and using 4 or 5 words instead of the 30 or so seen here. Personally I’m tempted to use this as my Twitter background, that or the underside of my business card. There’s a plethora of creative ideas you could come up with. If there’s anything that looks dead cool or introducing you manage to produce and would like to share, just drop me a message.

Of and of course, I couldn’t end this post without putting up what The Urban Shogun looks like in Wordle. Obviously. Have fun!