World Wide Wordle

After doing a quick post on Saturday utilizing a new-found tool (Wordle) to make my Master's Project Proposal into a word cloud, upon checking my RSS aggregator today it seems that Wordle has taken over the universe.

While I tend not to necessarily be a big fan of the latest fad tools (I can be a bit oppositional at times), the pure ease of operation and the beauty/meaning inherent in the created word/tag clouds is quite enrapturing. Although it is extremely interesting and perhaps a big enlightening to see people's del.icio.us tags in a beautiful cloud, perhaps the true power of this tool is to turn any text into a word cloud. The question that is most important (to me) is whether or not this is just a fun tool to perform a quick trick, or if it can be used to change the way text is interpreted. Any insights?

I did a quick perusal of backlinks and trackbacks from Wordle related posts in my reader just now. Here's what I found:

Del.icio.us tag clouds

And I leave you with my own del.icio.us tag cloud, which I don't feel gives you a full picture of my interests, but if you knew very little about me, it would certainly give you a little insight:

UPDATE- To emphasize the craze that Wordle has been in the last week, see the image below: