Want to know what a blog really spends time talking about?  Wordle.net provides a fun, visually appealing, and easy to understand way to do just that.

Just type the URL for a blog into the appropriate field and Wordle will create a “Word Cloud” just for you.  Wordle looks through the most recent blog posts, and the more often a word is used, the larger it appears in the cloud.

Here’s what the recent Gold Mine posts look like:

Words from the Gold Mine courtesy of www.wordle.net

And this is not the only automated word art you can create online.  Flipscript is a site dedicated to making ambigrams upon command (ambigrams are those words that can be flipped or rotated, and then read again).

Some sites even claim to have an automated process for creating logos.  However, the art of simultaneously tying words to an industry, market, and identity is not one that I would trust to an automated process which, by their very nature, will try to handle everything in the same way.

Besides, creating art from words is nothing new.  Our own Natalya Brandt is quite skilled at it, and cartoonist Will Eisner was well known for his ability to organically incorporate titles and mastheads into his designs so that they would become a natural part of the illustrated narrative rather than editorial asides.