alternatives to wordle?

wordle clouds are all over the place for two very good reasons: wordle looks good and is very user friendly, but there´s a few things you can´t do with it such as shape the clouds, get the words to fill a shape, put words within words, nor for on your blog is there any interactivity (click, move around on each below to compare that aspect) so here are a few free alternatives for comparison:

WordItOut

Tagxedo (if you cannot see this that is because you need microsoft silverlight installed*)
Tagul

worditout is very easy to use and you can fill all of that rectangle instead of editing away that white space in wordle (if you're fussy). but it looks very dull, not such a problem for worksheet photocopies however. on the web it has a built in google search link for each word.

*tagxedo looks funky on the web and has gained in popularity due to the growing library of shapes available. Despite that and the fact it has plenty of features two things need bearing in mind; one is that it's moving towards paying subscribers with reduced features available for free users, and the other is that silverlight is required. The 'Powered' by tagxedo tag is unforgivably naff too.

of the three, tagul is my personal preference and a prospective challenger to wordle: you can shape, edit embed as a flash object, download as an image etc etc, in short it looks as good as wordle with far more features. the only very minor snag is the need to be signed in.

To conclude, if you want to embed on the web then all three are worth consideration as alternatives to wordle having the advantage of interactivity as well as filling the shape. If you want more than rectangles for the web or photocopies then check out tagxedo and tagul.