Jonathan Feinberg, Senior Software Researcher at IBM’s Watson Research Center has made an interesting contribution to the landscape of visual folksonomy: wordle.net. Wordle is an impressive and expressive twist on the ‘tag cloud’ idea popularized by web 2.0 sites as a quick visual tool for identifying patterns in frequency and distribution of tagged items like blog posts, songs, pictures, etc.
Of course, Jonathan wasn’t alone in his work. Still, it sparks the fires of creativity to see something this cool released to the public and I want to thank all involved. Projects like Wordle remind us that the persuit of a technical vocations need not prohibit us from the very human desire to contribute beauty to the world.