This amazing “word cloud” was created by Wordle at http://wordle.net. The site creates customized word clouds from any text that you provide. Words that appear more frequently in the source text show up relatively larger. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The resulting images can be printed, shared on a BLOG. Heck, you can even put the images on T-shirts. You can put your Wordles in the on-line gallery which is open for the universe to see which is why so many of them are anonymous.

I entered my entire 170-page book, Staying Healthy in Sick Organizations: The Clover Practice™, and this is the picture I got. I was thrilled because it captured my book which is about what people can achieve in their work life. And when I write my next book, I will “Wordle” it to make sure the themes that are most important have the biggest presence.

Wordle is being used is to create word clouds of speeches of public figures and candidates. You can see at a glance what the speakers focused on most. It can be scary actually. Although the brilliant man who created Wordle, Jonathan Feinberg, calls it a “toy” it is really a tool for cutting to the core of what’s being said. I could imagine Wordle pictures of candidate speeches influencing the presidential election.

I like the idea of communicating visually. It’s a very nice change from the usual.