Wordle me this, Batman
I’ve never really been fond of tag clouds, but Wordle, by MacGyver of software (and former drummer for They Might Be Giants) Jonathan Feinberg gives the representation an aesthetic nudge lacking in most representations. The application creates word clouds from input data submitted by users. I was reminded of it yesterday by Eugene, who submitted Lorem Ipsum:
I had first heard about it from emailer Bill Robertson, who had uploaded Organic Information Design, my master’s thesis. (Which was initially flattering but quickly became terrifying when I remembered that it still badly needs a cleanup edit.)
A wonderful tree shape! Can’t decide which I like better: “information” as the stem or “data” as a cancerous growth in the upper-right.
Mr. Feinberg is also the reason that Processing development has been moving to Eclipse (replacing emacs, some shell scripts, two packages of bazooka bubble gum and the command line) because of his donation of a long afternoon helping set up the software in the IDE back when I lived in East Cambridge, just a few blocks from where he works at IBM Research.
