During recent serendipitous Internet surfing, I discovered Wordle. It's really quite interesting and revealing if you use it to discover patterns and trends in your communication.

To explain, here is the about us from the site: 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.

Wordle visually, by size, shows you word frequency. Sure you can make interesting pictures, art even. The real power is in word choice. How many of what words are you using? Does the output image make you think twice about the language and messaging you are using in your sales, marketing, development, and other communication materials?

I pasted in The Chief Storyteller elevator speech (the answer to "What do you do?" — first two images ) and my speaker's biography (bottom image). The images are below. As one would guess, "business," "stories," and "relationships" dominate my wordles.

You can change font, layout, colors, and a variety of other attributes. Become your own "Business Picasso."

Paste in some of your articles, website home page content, blog entries, membership documents, etc. Did Wordle reveal anything insightful for you?