After thinking about the fact that it’s a short week, I thought that it would make more sense to find simple online toys – a pair of things that may be useful, but that are also uncomplicated and interesting. After looking around, and spending rather a lot of time trying to find things that amused me as well as seemed to have some utility, I settled on two:
The first is: http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/
I get a lot of questions about finding things [outside of work, of course] and many of them are fairly simple – Let Me Google That For You seems to be a useful tool to cover some of those things. The idea behind LMGTFY that you can build a complicated search in google [or a simple one], and simply send someone the link created on the site. It then reruns the search within their browser, like:
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=cardinals+playoff+%22north+central%22+site%3Ad3football.com
I’ve no idea how long this site will be around, as I can’t imagine that Google is delighted by it. You might find it interesting, though – and perhaps helpful around the holidays.
The second thing is something that I find sort of fascinating – perhaps you will, too, or perhaps you’ll decide that I’m vaguely mad – Wordle creates java-based, on the fly "word clouds". If you haven’t seen one of these, they’re quite interesting.
You can paste in some text [or the link to a blog feed] and the application will parse the words in it, finding the most common ones. Those are then displayed in varying sizes, with the most common words in the document or site being the largest. There are a lot of layout options, from font choices to colorways, adjustments for language, general layout and number of words to display. Some of the things that are returned are very nearly word art -
Please note, however, if you save it to the online gallery, they’ll be visible to anyone who uses the Wordle site. While I don’t think there are any copyright implications…
Here are some of the more interesting ones I built:
Text copied from a series of our web pages:
The Fall ’08 Ex Libris
The recently updated Library Disaster Plan [Thanks Belinda!]
and last, though surely not least: The entire 2nd book of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Andros to Austria…
http://www.wordle.net/create
The biggest trick with Wordle is that you have to copy the image and paste it... though printing is also possible.
Have fun with these - if you have alternatives, by all means post them, and we'll give them a try!
jjs
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