If you've read my efforts here, or on the DGDC News blog, or on the NSGIC News blog, you'll know that I am a fan of Wordle, a lovely little web tool that is used to create word clouds from blocks of text. This morning, I read on TechCrunch that Wordle has run into trademark trouble. Someone already owns the name "wordle" and they want it back.
I use Wordle to creat graphics that illustrate points I'm trying to make. For example, here is a word cloud I made from the abstracts for presentations planned at the 2010 Delaware GIS Conference:
I used this in a series of posts introducing the various presentations. I've also used Wordle-generated word clouds in presentations, in e-mails, and as a representation of my work duties that is posted on my office door.
So, the thought of losing this tool makes me sad. The developer has posted a request for pro-bono legal advice. That's all there is at wordle.net just now. As far as I know, that site was never a money-making proposition.
I hope an accord with the trademark-owner can be reached. Or, at least, that the-site-formerly-known-as-Wordle can come back under a new name.
Update 1: Phil Bradley's comment points to his own post on this (Wordle Closed - alternatives) which includes a list of other word-cloud tools. It's very helpful.
Update 2:Richard James has let me know that Wordle is back, at least for now. And the TechCrunch post has been updated with a link to a twitter campaign to save wordle.
I wanted to try another of these wordle word-clouds. This one is a cloud of the tags I use in del.icio.us. A more practical and clickable version of this has long lived at the lowest left-hand spot on this blog, of course, but I think this gives an accurate picture of what my focus is when I browse the web and mark things for further use.
I search mostly for items of and about Delaware. Many of these I find in my work for state government; I track land-use issues among county and municipal governments. Many of these I mark for inclusion on various pages of my office's web site; we use items relating to land-use planning, about proposals reviewed under the PLUS Process, on the US Census, and about the use and sharing of geospatial data (GIS stuff). I've also used del.icio.us tags to supplement an aggregation of state GIS coordination RSS feeds that I help maintain for the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC).
I still want to take another crack at a family-tree wordle. The one I did the other night was just a selection from among the Mahaffies on my tree. I'm trying to figure out a way to extract all 1,700 of the people on my family tree and make a wordle from that last.
Just for fun, I ran the RSS from the blog through Wordle to see what the word cloud of recent posts looks like. Recent travel and Census stuff seem to predominate.
I found a transcript of Wednesday night's debate between Chris Coons and Christine O'Donnell at the University of Delaware and decided (of course) to make a series of word clouds.
For the two candidates, I left in their names, which appear at the start of each section of their comments in the transcript. I did so for artistic purposes.
If you haven't figured it out by now, I am voting for Chris Coons. I was leaning that way anyway; we've seen enough of Christine O'Donnell over the last two election cycles to know that she is not qualified.
I've posted the word-cloud from William Henry Harrison's marathon inaugural in 1841, above-right. It is the longest inaugural address in history and Harrison made it hat-less and coat-less on a cold, wet, March day. After two hours speaking (yikes) he attended several inaugural balls. He caught a cold; the cold lingered, became pneumonia, and led to Harrison's death on April 4, 1841.
I find this interesting, though I do have to point out that jamesparks101 is being something of a pain by tweeting the same thing, over and over, apparently to anyone who sends a tweet making reference to word-clouds:
...take a look at this wordle project retweet if worthy.
I'll not re-tweet, but thought it worth a mention here.
Pandora, over at DelawareLiberal has posted the text, as prepared for delivery, of the President's planned speech to students on Tuesday. I took the liberty of running it through wordle to see what the top 75 words would be.
Apparently, it's all about "School."
So much for "indoctrination."
There is an argument developing in the comments on Pandora's post that seeks to change the story about why there was an uproar. But one thing seems clear to me: It (the uproar) is pretty much just a load of crap and should be ignored. The problem I see is that uproar appears to be the preferred mode of public discourse these days.
It's a shame, really.
UPDATE: DelawareDem was kind enough to add a link to this post in another post on the subject on DelawareLiberal (turn-about=fair play?). The argument that ensued led me to try to do exactly the same wordle word cloud of a Ronald Reagan speech to students when he was president, back in 1988:
Please forgive the line on the left. I did a less accurate job with teh screen capture. It looks, from this, like Mr. Reagan's topic was a bit more political than Mr. Obama's.
There will be plenty of other people parsing the security/terrorism speeches by President Obama and Dick Cheney today. There are substantive differences in policy, of course. But I wanted to keep it simple and just look at the words. To the right is a word-cloud of Dick Cheney's speech. Note the largest word. We spent the last eight years having that word, "terrorists," shoved down our throats.
At left is a word cloud of President Obama's speech. His largest word is "people."
I picked up some interesting election-related items in my normal scanning routines today. I thought I'd offer some links here, in no particular order.
The text of both Barack Obama's and John McCain's election night speeches are on-line. I made wordles of each (yes, I am a great big techie-geek). As I've said, I was impressed by John McCain's speech, the wordle of McCain's speech does suggest that he puts (at least the word) "country" first. The wordle of Obama's speech suggests that he used the words "tonight," "people," and "America" most often.
There's a cool illustration of one of the changes that Barack Obama represents on the web site of Mathhew Buchanon. It shows, in a set of simple caricatures, the progression of faces of the 43 presidents so far, and the face of the 44th-elect.
Matt writes that he also missed the earlier version of John McCain:
I don't recall much of any talk from McCain from the last two months about his detailed plans or reasons why someone should vote for McCain, instead all I heard about was why I should against Obama. That's never a good path to take -- when you don't accentuate your positives and instead focus on negatives, even if you convince others to avoid the opponent you end up with followers that don't have much to be proud of.
Matt has a very young daughter:
I'm glad my daughter gets to grow up and will remember her first president being an inspirational guy that proves anyone can still make it in America.
It's been a busy week or two lately. You may have noticed a lack of posting here, but be sure I was busy elsewhere.
Last week at this time I was starting a short midyear conference of the National State's Geographic Information Council (NSGIC), in Annapolis. I'm communications chair for that group and so spend the conference taking notes and developing an on-line, cloud-based repository of conference stuff.
And when I returned to the office, it was to a release of 2010 Census redistricting data for Delaware, which I am working my way through as lead staff (the entire staff, to be honest) of the Delaware Census state Data Center.
So I was looking forward to this weekend; to a nice dinner out with both our girls and to ferrying daughter #1 back north to Villanova after her mid-term break. But old-lady nature threw me a curve and hit me with a fast-moving sinus infection that settled over the roots of my upper left molars for an effect like an un-ending explosion.
I'm on the mend though. And this morning came across a pleasant surprise in my RSS Reader feed (took me a while to get here, didn't it?). Yesterday I added a new blog, that of the proprietor of a new bookstore that has just opened here in Lewes called biblion. reading back through her entries, I found one from a week ago that included, as a one-off gesture to a friend, an embedded performance by
Rodrigo y Gabriela of their guitar duet Tamacun.
I've been a fan of this pair ever since hearing them interviewed on NPR a few years back. They are from Mexico, where they played heavy-metal rock before dropping out of that scene and travelling around Ireland for a time, where they earned their living playing more traditional music. They play a fusion of folk musics with a rock and roll abandon that I quite like.
This tune is on my iPod and gets much use when I'm writing, the rhythms and fast pace seem to help my fingers keep up with my brain.
NPR is playing with some of my favorite on-line tools this evening following President Obama's fine and inspiring State of the Union speech. They've asked folks, via twitter, to respond to a very brief survey asking for three words in reaction to the speech. and they are running the results through the wordle word-cloud creator.
The NPR 3-word reaction survey used a simple Google Documents form and collected about 4,000 responses in the first half hour after the speech. Clearly, people either tickled by, or annoyed by, the President's salmon joke dominated the resulting word cloud.
And, as we make our way across the Delaware countryside, through the Eastern shore of Maryland and across the Bay Bridge (to Grandmother's Uncle John's house), I hope to find this song on the radio somewhere.
Because that's just part of the holiday tradition.
I read 63 and one-half books in 2008, an average of one book every 5.7 days. That's one of the findings of my year-long Reading Log experiment.
Starting a year ago today, with Custer’s Brother’s Horse, and running through The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which I started on December 29 and was halfway through as the ball dropped between 2008 and 2009, I have kept a blog-style reading list. I have recorded title, author, publication date, publisher and a few short thoughts about each book that I have read.
The word-cloud that decorates this post (thanks wordle!) is built from the tags I used for each post. It suggests that I prefer fiction to non-fiction and favor historical fiction and fantasy (often in combination). Most books I read are set in the US or the UK and many had to do with war or its effects on folks.
Just over 56% of the books I read (36) were from the Lewes Library. Of the remaining 44%, most were books I bought or was given as gifts, except for a few that were loaners from my brother Matt.
The overwhelming majority (60) were novels. Two were collections of essays, one was organizational self-help, and one was biography.
I'm not certain how to carry forward into 2009. I know I'll keep reading. I always have, as far back as I can remember. But I don't know that I still want to "blog" my reading. I have a day or two to consider, while I finish 2008's final book. Then I may create an on-line spreadsheet, or look for some twitter-like tool that will let me keep track.
Barack Obama's candidacy was one of the most web-enabled we've seen and it looks like his transition and presidency will be as well. The transition, for example, will be on line at change.gov.
There are several cool spots on flickr that are focused on our president-to-be. There's a group called "A message for Obama" that invites users to post photographed messages for the President-Elect. I made mine with wordle.
I think this web-connectedness is part of why I'm so excited about Obama. It's not just that he's using the web the way it can and should be used. It's also the fact that it doesn't seem at all forced; his techie-ness is natural.
Some among the Congressional republicans are blaming a speech by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the failure of the republicans to deliver the votes they needed to pass the $700 billion bailout plan. Apparently Speaker Pelosi, like many of us out here on Main Street, blames the problems of Wall Street at least in part on George Bush:
Pelosi had said that the $700 billion price tag of the measure “is a number that is staggering, but tells us only the costs of the Bush Administration’s failed economic policies — policies built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision, and no discipline in the system.”
Those are fairly strong words, but not out of line for politics and politicians. And was that all she said? I took a look at the full text of the speech, as posted on Talking Points memo this afternoon. That bit there? That's the second paragraph.
As I read it, she smacks the Wall Street folks around much more thoroughly than she does the President or the Republicans.
The corporate CEOs whose companies will benefit from the public's participation in this recovery must not benefit by exorbitant salaries and golden parachute retirement bonuses.
Our message to Wall Street is this: the party is over. The era of golden parachutes for high-flying Wall Street operators is over. No longer will the U.S. taxpayer bailout the recklessness of Wall Street.
This is the one thing that both right- and left-wing folks I've talked to agree about right now. (That and the delightful fact that the Cowboys were beat yesterday)
So. Was Nancy Pelosi so horrible? I don't think so.
Frank remarked on the numerical "coincidence" that the number of "deeply offended Republicans" who voted no equalled exactly the number needed to reach the 218 votes in favor to pass the bill.
"I'll make an offer," he added. "Give me those 12 people's names and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them and tell them what wonderful people they are and maybe they'll now think about the country."
I've been creating word clouds of some of the major speeches from the Democratic National Convention. That's Joe Biden's speech at right.
I'm using Wordle, which I've been having a great time with this summer both here and in a newsletter(PDF) I created for work. Word clouds present the most frequently used words in any body of text. They are often sorted by frequency of use, with the most used words in the largest font.
There's a neat light java tool out there called Wordle which creates colorful word-clouds. They are not the sort of thing that you can use for navigation, but they are loads of fun.
I have created a few, including this one based on a bunch of names from my family tree. Have a browse through the gallery and see if you aren't tempted to make one yourself.
