A few more changes to Tagxedo:

Embeddable App

This is the feature that many are waiting for: saving the Tagxedo cloud as a Silverlight app! All you need to do is to (1) download the "Xap", and (2) add a simple code snippet to your Html. The "Xap" file is the Silverlight equivalent of .swf or .fla.

You'll be able to see the Tagxedo cloud on your webpage, with the full animation and outgoing links. The outgoing links are currently still defaulted to Google search, but this will be changed shortly.

Currently users will be able to create only one kind of app -- called an "Embedded Tagxedo". The XAP file of an embedded Tagxedo contains (almost) all the information required to display the tag cloud with full animation, including the fonts used. Typically, the size of the XAP file is around 35KB including the font. However, if the Tagxedo cloud uses a lot of fonts (i.e. when the "all fonts" option is chosen), the resulting app will be very big (e.g. 1MB).

For completeness I'll also mention that there is another kind of app -- called a "Dynamic Tagxedo" -- that does not embed the fonts into XAP, but references them symbolically. When a dynamic Tagxedo app is started, it will dynamically download the fonts if they are not already present in the browser cache. In fact, all playable Tagxedo clouds in the gallery are dynamic apps. The main advantage of a dynamic app is that a font that is referenced by multiple dynamic Tagxedoes only need to be downloaded once (and subsequently cached by the browser). That said, this method is currently not publicly released because if a user uploads a dynamic Tagxedo to a widely popular website, it may cause unsustainable bandwidth pressure on Tagxedo. If this is a must, I would like to hear from you.

Another issue is that certain blog platforms such as Google Blogger or Wordpress may not allow this kind of embedding. I believe there is a way around it, possibly using some iframe-based gadget. However, I'm not familiar enough with these platforms to make any recommendation.

Options on Numbers and Punctuations

You can now control how Tagxedo should treat numbers and punctuations. The default is to ignore them, but you can override that. For punctuations, you even have fine-grain control over individual punctuations marks (such as skipping all '#', but not '!').

Options on Stop Words and Stemming

By default, Tagxedo removes all common English words (such as 'we', 'they', 'are', and 'how'), and performs "stemming" which is to count related words (such as 'tuxedo' and 'tuxedoes') as the same word. You can now override both behaviors.