I way dig this guy's blog. Aside from very high calibre layout and design, and his uncanny ability to find brown hues that actually work, he has this wicked 'tag cloud' functionality.
He has a java script that parses all his posts, finds the most commonly used words by month, and the most recently used words, then sizes and colors them and gives you a slider that allows you to scroll back and forth in time to find what he has been talking about most often and for the longest time. Of course, you can click on any of the words in the cloud and it will open a page with all the posts that use that word.
The word 'cool' simply does not have enough 'o's in it to capture how cooooool that is. Once I have enough actual content on this blog to make that even remotely useful as a search tool for wanderers, I'll have to get the same thing.
I also think there are some interesting practical applications for this tool. It could be used to parse the mass-media, internet wide, to predict trends in pop-culture and get a jump start on developing entertainment that will arrive just as certain concepts boil over in the mass-consciousness. It kind of reminds me of Watchmen, and how Ozymandias parsed the media by watching a bunch of TV channels all at once to understand all of us lesser beings. Anyway, this dude has a billion dollar invention in his hands. He should sell it to Google right now.
I also think his web-comic 'Calm Down!' is hilarious.
Clint,
A few weeks ago I pondered out loud (http://toomuchimagination.blogspot.com/2006/10/trend-or-coincidence.html) whether a media agnostic tag-cloud application existed and was used by marketers or trend watchers to predict the next big thing.
If you took this tool and ran it across all the games designers' blogs, I wonder what sort of zeitgeist it would uncover? ;)
-Ben
Posted by: Ben Mattes | November 04, 2006 at 04:15 PM
Drama games, sociallly dyanmic character interaction. Or at least, thats what it'd get on my blog. I think it'd be interesting just from a personal standpoint, as a way of charting your personal evolution over a year or two.
I think I chatted with Mehta while I was in San Jose last March, waiting to print out my return ticket. He seems like a very down-to-earth guy for someone whose surname is phontetically similar to "meta".
Posted by: Patrick | November 04, 2006 at 06:06 PM
It's a really interesting tool, I sure hope he open-sources it.
I actually met Mehta at a loft party in NYC last summer. He's got some great ideas rolling around in that head. Only thing that's creepy is how much he loves his cats.
Posted by: Taylor | November 06, 2006 at 04:44 PM
Did you see the cool application he put it to outside of his own posts?
http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/
Tag clouds for presidential speeches. Biggest word in all of GW Bush's speeches? Terrorist. In one of Bill Clinton's it was actually welfare! Scroll the slider and watch Mexico get more or less attention over time. It's an amazing use of the tool.
Posted by: James Everett | November 06, 2006 at 07:01 PM
James:
Actually it was the presidential cloud I saw first when someone sent me the link at work to it. It is very fucking cool - but then I became more generally intrigued by the tech itself, which is why I blogged about that.
Today I was imagining the idea of having a flash-based tag cloud where the words are acutally floating around the screen in a more literal 'cloud' with the most common ones being larger and slower moving, and the less common ones being smaller and flitting about very rapidly. It would be basically the same - but with graphics! And as we all know, graphics makes everything better!
Posted by: Clint | November 07, 2006 at 12:07 AM
The whole tagging/folksonomy thing is fascinating.
I've seen a flash implementation of a headline aggregator that uses larger or smaller bricks of color to indicate how many outlets are carrying a story but I can't find the link at the moment. In a similar vein however is http://liveplasma.com/, grouping music and movies by similarity and dumping the result as a navigable flash map of nodes.
There's a really in depth breakdown of how tag cloud systems work and how they might evolve over at Joe Lamantia's site (don't know him, just found it while googling stuff like this) http://tinyurl.com/yxj5bs
Posted by: James Everett | November 07, 2006 at 02:23 AM
This was going to drive me nuts until I found it. The aggregator I was referring to was built by Stamen Design http://stamen.com/projects/inthenews
They have some amazing visualization systems up and running. The one for digg is freaky to watch in action. http://labs.digg.com/swarm/
Posted by: James Everett | November 07, 2006 at 02:46 AM