Wow, I just discovered Wordle. This is an exciting online service that will take text and generate a word cloud of the text for you.

You can either paste some text into the box – from documents, ppts, or websites  for example, or you can enter the name of a website – for instance a blog, and have that analyzed.

Here is a sample from text that I copied from a number of articles on the Anecdote site:

So, apart from just being cool, what is the use of something like this?  I think it shows very cleverly what the repeating issues of texts are, and thus can help to see what kind of tone or even emotions it will call forth. Apart from the sentence meaning, what is the general impression fostered by the text?

Want to see if your wonderful treatise about the joy of life really does reflect a spirit of joy? Try plugging the text in here, if the biggest word you see is “problem” and “joy” is rather small, well, draw your own conclusions!