Wordle: Capture your blog in a single picture

Wordle is an interesting little web-based toy that creates a "word cloud" from text you provide. Words that appear more often in the text appear larger in the finished cloud.

One of the most interesting ways to use this toy, is to provide a blog or feed as the form of input. For example, the following word cloud was created using the feed from this blog :

Picture from Wordle

As you can tell from the word cloud, I've been doing a lot of Batman related posts recently. For someone like me, who uses this blog for a variety of things, it's interesting to see some reoccurring themes.

A bleaker example of a word cloud can be seen from this word-cloud I created using the BBC Front-Page News feed:

It could be fun to use this with your twitter feeds, to find out what people are tweeting about. Or with Facebook status updates. You could output your music as text from iTunes and then create a word cloud to represent your musical taste.

Make your own word cloud using Wordle and link to it in the comments.

Poken: Crossing the Social Networking Divide

When it comes to social networking, I've tried most of the flavours. I started with a Myspace, moved onto a Bebo, before currently settling on my Facebook profile.

I think that these services are now an invaluable tool for sharing my life with other people. I can talk about what I'm up to, share photos, and chat with friends. Using things like my twitter and Facebook updates, I try to give people online an insight into some areas off my off-line life. But there is still a separation, there is a line between the online social networking accounts and 'real life' social networking. I was very excited to read about a company who are crossing that divide, and combining real life interactions with online social networks.

Poken (currently in beta) is a company selling small key chain mascots called Pokens. Your personal Poken character is programmed with your online social-networking information (e.g. email address, instant messenger ID, Facebook accounts, and more to come). When you meet someone else, to exchange this information with them you high-five the Pokens like you see in the picture above. The action of high-fiving the Pokens allows the details to be exchanged between them. Now, when the Poken is plugged back into your computer (thru' USB) it automatically links your accounts.

I suppose it's a bit geeky, but it's a slick way to exchange details - no need for business cards, or scribbling down on napkins. It also sort of confirms that your going to be connected, it's become part of an automatic process rather than a business card that someone may get around to reading again.

They are currently only selling Pokens in packs of 12 - so if they are 11 people out there who are also interested, leave me a comment and we can get something sorted! It would work out about £8 each.

What do you think about this? Is this a step too far? Or should we be embracing the crossover of real-life and online social networking?

It looks funny, but 'snot

Nosefrida Nasal Aspirator

Child-friendly mucus removal

The Nosefrida is a remarkably effective tool for sucking snot out of a kid's nose. It's basically a flexible plastic tube with a mouthpiece on one end and a snot-collection chamber on the other. You put the mouthpiece in your mouth, press the open end of the snot-collection chamber against your kid's nostril (it doesn't go very far inside the nose), and SUCK. An inline filter prevents the snot from ending up in your mouth. The filter only needs to be changed when it gets gunked-up. Such gunking can be avoided by stopping periodically and blowing the collected snot out into a sink or emesis basin. Otherwise, if you keep filling up the snot-collection chamber, it eventually makes its way up to the filter. To clean, I just disassemble it and run warm water through it. Real easy.

It sounds disgusting and bizarre, but it works like a charm. If you've got a snotty kid, it's the best $15 you'll ever spend. My daughter got her first cold when she was three months old. It was a real nasty one, with lots of nasal congestion. My wife is a family doctor, and she suggested the standard course of action: spray saline up the kid's nose and try sucking the nastiness out with a bulb syringe. Anybody who's ever used a standard bulb syringe knows that it's a suboptimal tool for this project, for two main reasons: (1) A bulb syringe is too small to generate adequate suction to pull thick snot out of a kid's nose, and (2) little kids hate having a bulb syringe stuck up their nostrils. Can you blame 'em?

-- Mike Pedone