Thing #36 -- Generators

I played around a lot with the Generator Blog, Big Huge Labs and Glass Giant for Thing #5 and Thing #6, so I didn't go back to them this time. The category I was most interested in was the Tag Cloud links. Tag clouds have intrigued me ever since I became aware of them. I like the way their visual communication style makes search results, blog postings or other "data sets" easy to comprehend. At a conference session a couple years ago I wrote in my notes, "How do you make a tag cloud?" and I quickly replaced the standard label list on this blog with a tag cloud.

One of the most creative uses of tag clouds I've seen is Hindsight is Always 20/20 by R. Luke Dubois. This project takes the text of each of the President's State of the Union addresses and presents them as word clouds in the format of eye charts. Browsing through the charts, it's easy to discover what issues were important (or believed to be important) at different stages of our country's history.

Below is a cloud I created with Wordle using the words in this blog. I like the many options the site provides for customizing font, color, and word layout.

I did go to ToonDoo to find a library-related comic. The one I chose is by subDes, who has done many strips with a library theme. I don't like the options the site gives for embedding comics, however. One makes you have to scroll through the strip, which lessens some of its impact. The other option doesn't seem to work, it just shows blank space.

by subDes | Create your own Cartoon at www.toondoo.com