I like the wonderful blog Zebra Sounds where I always find fun, inspiring, and thought-provoking word bites.  This author pulls together information from diverse sources and she weaves it in an entertaining and enlightening way.

I particularly enjoyed her post about Wordle and how it is being used to make a statement in politics, advertising and elsewhere.  Here is the explanation of Wordle’s basics from the official website:

“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 a Wordle of jane,candid:

Wordle can even be a handy gizmo for writers.  Because the size of the word is correlated to the number of times that word appears in the text, I can see which words I use most often.  For example, it is clear to me now that I just use the word “just” too often.  I also must have been writing about the author J.A. Konrath quite a few times, because he and all his aliases, as well as his new book Afraid (to be released on March 31st), appear all over the place.  Scary!

I like the back story of the inventor of Wordle, Jonathan Feinberg, and how shares his toys with the world.  On his Wordle Blog, he tells how he made a Word Vader for his son.  I make up little stories at bedtime about flying lawn care machinery — he creates mind-blowing visuals with some code he just had lying around.  That’s a Cool Parent.

I normally do not like little gadgety internet things, but this one makes words into art, and those are both good things.  Plus, if Zebra Sounds says it is interesting, I usually agree.  I like wordling.  Beware though, it is addictive.  You can randomize your chosen word cloud an infinite number of times — and before you know it, time got wordled away…

I made a collage of Wordles for the Little One, filled with adjectives about him, his hobbies and interests and collections and words that make him smile.  I framed them and hung them in his room.  Free art that is personalized, and a person who shares his toys.  What could be better?