Wordle

I was checking out the blog of the new Moderator of the Presbyterian Church and came across a post about this very cool tool.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Here is the first one that I created from a document that I will go into more detail about at a later date.

Go try it out for yourself at Wordle.net. You may need to update your Java plug in to make it work as I did, but the links for that are in the site's FAQ section and it only takes a few minutes.

UPDATE: Here's one I made from a letter that I wrote to my grandmother back in 2002.

UPDATE 2: I'm addicted now. I've got a little gallery of my own going now.