I recently read a popular novel that overused the word "pale" to the point that it became a distraction for me, and I found it difficult to read the book. What if the author could visually see how many times that word was used in comparison to all the other words in the text? Wordle is a very cool tool that lets you do just that. You can paste in a body of text, or analyze your "delicious" bookmarks, or point to a particular page on the web, and Wordle will create a picture based on the number of times each word is used. Even better, though, is that you can set the font, the colors, the layout, and have the program eliminate common words from analysis. The image that you see in this post was taken from a history of New Hampshire: http://www.nh.gov/nhinfo/history.html
You can access Wordle here: http://www.wordle.net/ (Note: it's wordle.net, not wordle.com) I always get that wrong the first time 🙂