Word (art) clouds

A friend pointed out Wordle to me, which “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.”

I tried it out with the text on the CommunitySense home page:

Apart from truly being a piece of art and aesthetically pleasing, such “tag clouds ++” should have real business applications. It would be interesting to see how, say, a 100 page report would look like and whether its visualization could help in quickly grasping some of its essential meaning.