One of the sites I showed at ABA TECHSHOW'S 60 Sites in 60 Minutes was Wordle. The producers even call it a toy. They say "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." But there is actually some value in examining word frequency in an easy-to-understand graphical format. Here is a Wordle of the year to date posts in my Law Practice Tips blog.

And Carolyn Elefant tells the story of how she used this toy—er–tool with great results for, of all things, a talk on marine renewables energy.

You can paste the text from a long document into Wordle. Try it with a brief or long article. You can also alter colors, horizontal to vertical ratio, font and other items. But to see if your trial brief emphases what you planned by word count can be a useful exercise.

I did a program for the Oklahoma State Webmasters Group on Web 2.0 last month. The paper created such interesting word clouds that I saved two of them. Click to expand.