Ran into something interesting on Infosthetics this evening, a little brew-your-own word cloud tool named Wordle. Many of you may have seen “tag clouds” or “heat maps” on folks blogs, showing frequently-used tags in larger text than the more rarely-used ones. My gallery has one of sorts built in, with the text size scaled logarithmically. A better example of how programmatic word cloud generation falls apart in practical use is over at Anime なの, where the nature of rabid anime fandom tilts the scale towards only a couple titles at a time, obscuring the cloud’s purpose and reducing its usefulness.

Wordle makes it oh-so-much prettier, though, and can handle an alarmingly large amount of text. The image above is the entire 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, with common words (i.e. “the,” “and,” “or”) removed. There are several typefaces available, a handful of color schemes, and it’s just plain fun to tinker with.