Wordle is a free web-based tool to create artistic word clouds by pasting text into a window and selecting the style, font, color and a number of other attributes. I created 4 wordles below the fold for the acceptance speeches of Obama, McCain, Biden and Palin at the Democratic and Republican conventions. I leave it to the reader as to whether Wordles of these highly-processed and vetted speeches tell us anything about the character of the speakers, but it was fun creating them.

For those not familiar with tag and word clouds: The relative size of each word in the cloud is based upon the number of times the word appears in the text. Unfortunately, the software does not take into account the various forms and inflection of a word, so the Wordle may understate the number of times words with the same stem appear in the text.


Obama acceptance speech:


Biden speech:



McCain acceptance speech:



Palin speech: