I don't remember when I found Wordle but as soon as I did, I bookmarked it thinking it would be fun to play with. As many bookmarks do, it sat there for a while, untouched, until I thought I would dump some content in there and see what came out. The results were actually pretty interesting.
Wordle allows you to dump a body of text into it and then pulls out the most common terms from the data. For example, we had a ton of user feedback about GotVMail's website and service--over 4000 submissions organized into 'promoter' and 'detractor' categories. When I dumped those two sets of data into Wordle, I was able to see which terms appeared with the most frequency. The bigger the term is in the Wordle "cloud," the more it appeared in the data. This allowed me to see quickly what the two data sets had both in common and what they didn't.
Below see a quick Wordle image I created from a draft document for new user help content. As I expected the word "extension(s)" was the largest, followed by "greeting" and "edit." Think about the text data you have that would benefit from being inserted into Wordle--what patterns do you identify and do you find it useful?
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