This is the first post in my new Tool Tips series, hopefully a weekly best-of with tools that I found helpful to support eParticipation efforts. 

Today I want to introduce a small but interesting web app that allows you to quickly visualize results of workshops or online dialogues - Wordle.net. While summarizing dialogues will always be a human task, Wordle parses text or web pages and quickly outputs a nice graph of the most frequently used words, thereby highlighting emerging themes.Very useful for on-the-fly report-outs and easy to embed on your web site ( I also found it works quite well with our TextTheMob.com message boards ).

A similar alternative is TagCrowd.com, less visually compelling, but doesn't require Java.