Background: A word cloud is a weighted list of words. Give us your blog URL and our thrifty robot scans your site, counts up as many words as it can find in thirty seconds, and spits them out in a nice pretty picture. The words you use more often are larger, and the less-frequently-used words are not. We also have word clouds taken from the archives of non-digital proto-bloggers like Herman Melville and Shakespeare. There’s a bunch of colors to choose from and different fonts to play with as well. An exceptional group of people worked extra hard to make this all happen, and I couldn’t be happier with the result. I do hope you’ll pay us a visit.

two 二 dos δύο deux zwei due ni dois twee 2

Flickrâ„¢ Pro Accounts to give away by July 15 and no one to give them to. Use the Contact Me form on this website to send your request if you don’t know my email. No contest I’m not qualified to judge in the first place. No hoops to jump through. Just tell me you love me and make me feel all warm and special. First two in are the winners..

update: we’re done, thanks for playing…

It works best by going to the web-page for the specific post (click the title of any post) and then cuing up the translation. Trying to do the whole front-page in translation seems to b0rk it a bit. But have fun, go crazy…just don’t break anything .

Sadly, despite the Freedom Friesâ„¢ flag on the far right, there is no button to make the English more readable, you’re on your own when it comes to deciphering my native tongue. But if you’re feeling frustrated then click a flag and give Deutsch, or Portuguese, or Chinese (Simplified) a whirl. Your results may vary with the Asian tongues, however. Informed sources tell me the Japanese translates as gobbledygook . Most likely a symptom of my overwrought, punctuation-deprived sentences, but the Western languages seem to work pretty well.

Anyway, enjoy! Sowieso genießen Sie! ¡De todas formas, goce! Quoi qu’il en soit, appréciez! In ogni modo, goda! Em todo o caso, aprecíe! いな, たのしみなさい! 어쨌든, 즐기십시요! 无论如何, 享用!

[edit: SEE ALSO the almost-even-more-totalllly WICKED puddlejumper - a raincoat decorated with electroluminescent silkscreens that light up in patterns mimicking rainfall in response to drops falling on the coat's raindrop sensors...this is so Bladerunnerâ„¢ cool...me WANTIE! ]

[edit: see also the awesome Robot knits...someone obviously bought a bunch of extra tickets for the talent-go-round ]

Groupative discussion webware enabling you to pop right from a website/blogpost/etc. to a custom-made “conversation space” (ugh, use the ‘Discuss’ Link at the bottom of this post if you want an example) into which you can invite all your friends. One nice feature is that it is owned by People Who Are Not Evilâ„¢ a nice note on a day when the US takes ‘one small step for ignorant legislating, one GIANT step for privacy-destroying government intrusiveness offering us NO meaningful improvement in our general welfare (in this case, security from people who want to explode and take as many of us along as possible) while making rampant abuse with corrupt intent as well as Orwellian totalitarianistic fun-n-games virtually certain thanks to its piss-poor design and lack of oversight from anyone within the legislative process who might be expected to maybe, perhaps, without for once being told to by George Soros and a billion web petitions from the EFF, provide that sort of thing’. Needs to import more stuff, like the permalink instead of the root URL for blogs, and needs to check existing public discussions and provide the option to join there instead (for things like newspaper articles, Lindsey Lohan gushing, political (yawn) mud-slinging, etc.). Nice trick to allow blogpost discussions and perhaps end the arms race with “Texas Hold Em” and the other spam geniuses fouling our T3 lines. It will be a blessed event, a new era, a fully standards-compliant, w3c utopia…until they (inevitably) learn to synch electromagnetic emissions with our neural electro-chemistry and pump the Cialisâ„¢ adverts (Now it is not necessary to refuse yourself in alcohol!) directly into our brain. <snark>I for one am looking forward to the day I am forced to subject my own thoughts to a Türing Test.</snark>

A semantic-search tool for use at home. Useful if you are attempting to become a writer. Of if you just want to be more like him. Whose new book has been the hottest topic for bloggers for at least the past eight minutes. Definitely a person whose brain I wouldn’t mind borrowing for a year or two…I’ll keep my hair though, I like mine better. Mr. Berlin Johnson has a great writeup of his technique for using this tool in due : Post 1, Post 2.

Lastly, a (possible) replacement to the bookmarks folder, trying to use tags (the flickr/gmail approach) and meta-data to make a useful, searchable list of links. Anything is better than browser bookmarks, which is where links go to DIE on my computer. My hierarchies suck, and there’s so much stuff that half of the folders end up getting duplicated. One neat feature here is that if you highlight text on the web page before you press the magic button to suck up its URL the text comes with it and populates the notes field, purrrriddy nifty. But there’s so much clicking sorting involved I’m not sure it’ll end up working out, the technology is there, but I’m not sure my effort is. Still, if one can stay motivated, it seems like it could (FINALLY) make bookmarks a living, breathing animal, pawing and snorting behind the starting gate to get out there and really chew up the int4rn3t.

One of the authors at core77 got linked to my slideshow from Tokyo Design Week and evidently liked what they saw. Their own site is a lot of fun and filled with interesting and beautiful things, including the one linked below. Check out the knife block in particular, brilliant.

Every Calvin & Hobbes Comic Ever.

$0.01 per MB with 300,000 songs…Green Day’s American Idiot, U2′s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, Scissor Sisters, The Chemical Brothers’ Push The Button…incredible.

One of the most beautiful websites I’ve ever seen.

Typographic Illustration and hit ‘typo illus ii’ at the bottom of this Flash Website for some Remixes. ref.

I <3 Ninja Wednesday.

The Flickr website now has a Metroblogging Tokyo group…

Headshots from the street and transcripts of what they said they were thinking about in the seconds before the photo.

A really really “must-see” picture of the Gates. (haha #1 on NYTimes most-emailed)

Yuppie: I don’t think he’s working now. All he ever talks about is monkeys and robots.

Lego Church

There are lots of interesting and/or impressive people involved in this little project, so I hope you will check it out. Also, let’s be 110% honest, it’s hard enough for me to post updates to one blog with any kind of regularity…so I will “Do My Best™” but the majority of my thought-cycles concerning Nihon will probably be directed to that site. Also, if anyone has anything interesting (and preferably tokyo-related but that is not an absolute criteria) they want me to post, please feel free to contact me: my handle is denshi and my post-@, pre-dotcom signifier is the mail of the ‘g’…:)

On How We Discuss Blogs