<p><strong>Word Cloud (Beta)</strong> is a free, easy to use web-based tool designed to run in a browser window. It generates a <strong>list of high-frequency words</strong> from plain text document at a user-specified web address or from the user's files, and <strong>visualizes</strong> them in a <strong>Java-enhanced web page </strong>that sizes words based on that frequency.</p> <p>There are a few <strong>options</strong> available for this tool. Users may limit the number of top words appearing in the cloud and choose whether or not to apply the Glasgow <strong>stop list</strong>. Once the page has loaded, the user can view the number of times a word appears in the text by hovering their cursor over that word, or click on the word to view a <strong>concordance</strong> for it.</p> <p>The <strong>results</strong> may be displayed by appearance, frequency or alphabetically, and users can enable or disable a fixed layout on the results page.</p> <p>This tool has only a few <strong>problems</strong>. When identifying words, it tends to include punctuation such as quotation marks. The size scaling of the least frequent to most frequent words in the cloud is not sufficiently diverse to allow for the clear distinction between words when the cloud is generated from 50 or less of the top words. In addition, while it will accept HTML and XML documents, it strips all tagging and processes it as if it were plain text.</p> <p><strong><em>Despite these limitation, Word Cloud (Beta) is an effectively enriched variation on the standard a word cloud for visualizing high frequency words in a document.</em></strong></p>