Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Aloha, Kaimuki

I was delighted to see that Honolulu's Kaimuki Public Library is using Wordle as the basis for a weekly contest. What I particularly like is that nobody felt it necessary to explain what a Wordle is.

Be Creative: Play Wordle

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

My 5 Words of Fame

As you may know, Wordle won both the Webby and the People's Voice Webby for Best Use of Typography at this year's Webby awards. In order to maximize their income from entrance fees and winner's tickets (many hundreds of dollars), they have an inordinate quantity of categories. They make a virtue of their scammy excesses by strictly limiting winners' speeches to 5 words.

Imagine my chagrin when the very first winner went up on stage and recited the 5-word address I'd planned.

This is the best I could do under time pressure. I'm not sure whether I ought to have had more to drink, or less.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Word Vader

I was putting my son to bed, and I said, "I feel like writing a computer program, but I don't have any ideas," and he said, "make something that draws Star Wars characters with words," and I had most of the code for that kind of thing lying around, and here it is.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Wordles and the Inaugural Addresses

In the days after the inauguration of #44, I saw many, many blog posts and newspaper stories featuring Wordles of the inaugural address. In my opinion, while they are lovely enough, they don’t really address what makes one person’s words distinctive. To see if I could do any better, I spent a couple of days making Comparisons of Inaugural Addresses.

thumbnail of lLincoln's 2nd inaugural

 

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Stimulus.

Graph of Wordle usage on inaguration day

In addition restoring the rule of law and implicitly repudiating torture, preemptive war, and being stupid on government property, Barack Obama has also driven an amazing amount of traffic to Wordle today.

Thanks, #44.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The Wordle-Users Google Group is Dead

Long live the WordleUsers Google Group.

Unfortunately, the Google Groups administration interface does not permit you to delete any more than one post at a time, and there were hundreds of spam messages from before the moment when I turned on moderation. I have blown away the existing archive, which was too polluted by spam to be useful, and created a new group.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

For Wordle users in the educational field

I commend to you: mugs of authority. Excellent stocking-stuffer for yourself or for the harried middle-school teacher in your household.

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