Here’s a little tidbit about me. I love making wordles.

Now, I know they have been floating around the web for a while, but you might still be asking yourself: so what the heck is a wordle anyway?

Well, a wordle shows you how frequently certain words appear in a given text. A visualization is created and words are filtered according to size – the larger they are, the more times they are spotted in the text. You can also customize the text, colour, and shape of your wordle. You can make wordles online – just input text, an RSS feed, or a delicious account name, and let the site work its magic. After that, you can save it to a public gallery and – since it is Creative Commons licensed – share your textual masterpiece from the world.

So I’m sure what you’re wondering right now is how on earth wordles are anything but a silly timewaster. Here’s the thing: they paint a picture that help marketers to tell stories. If you’re about to go into a meeting to get a budget approval, and you want to give your Director of Operations a snapshot around how people feel about your product category, you might go to a consumer blog that focuses on your industry, grab the RSS, and wordle it. If you’re looking into cross promotional partner opportunities and are trying to figure out what organizations best match the corporate culture of your own, grab their feeds and wordle them.

For example, here’s a simple wordle that I created using the RSS feed for our blog. The most common words used by the Infiltrators are: business, just, employees, marketing, company, and – my personal favourite – collaborative.

Though no means scientific, wordles are a fun way to see what words you most often write. Try putting in your own blog, twitter, or delicious feed and give it a try!