When I told my family I wrote an article about tag clouds for O’Reilly, they went “Huh? What’s that?” But then again, these are the same folks that thought I was writing an article for this guy, instead of these guys.

Anyway, this is a tag cloud:

This particular tag cloud is a map of my interests for the past few weeks, based on the bookmarks I have been saving to my del.icio.us account.

My new article, “Build Tag Clouds in Perl and PHP,” shows you how to build one of these amorphous wonders for your website. More importantly, it shows you how to use them effectively, and it contains the word “pie.” Doesn’t get much better than that. Here’s the official blurb:

Tag clouds are everywhere on the web these days. First popularized by the web sites Flickr, Technorati, and del.icio.us, these amorphous clumps of words now appear on a slew of web sites as visual evidence of their membership in the elite corps of “Web 2.0.” This PDF analyzes what is and isn’t a tag cloud, offers design tips for using them effectively, and then goes on to show how to collect tags and display them in the tag cloud format. Scripts are provided in Perl and PHP.

Yes, some have said tag clouds are a fad. But as you will see, tag clouds, when used properly, have real merits. More importantly, the skills you learn in making your own tag clouds enable you to make other interesting kinds of interfaces that will outlast the mercurial fads of this year or the next.

Martin Wattenberg’s The Shape of Song provides a series of graphic analyses of MIDI files. The arches link musical phrases that are repetitions of each other, and provide a striking guide to the structure of the music.

The above image is Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” The site contains images of varying styles of music ranging from Bach to Philip Glass.

Link courtesy of Darryl Handy.

A PicoCricket is a tiny computer that can make things spin, light up, and play music.

You can plug lights, motors, sensors, and other devices into a PicoCricket, then program them to react, interact, and communicate.

For example, you can make a cat and program it to purr when someone pets it. Or you can make a birthday cake and program it to play a song when someone blows out the candles.

The PicoCricket Kit is similar to the LEGO® MINDSTORMS™ robotics kits. MINDSTORMS is designed especially for making robots, while the PicoCricket Kit is designed for making artistic creations with lights, sound, music, and motion.

The Playful Invention Co.

I’m testing out Google’s new “Gmail for your domain” service with my domain heaven.com.

Here’s a screen snapshot. It’s pretty cool – all the goodness I’ve come to expect from GMail, with a much cooler domain name.

god@heaven.com currently gets about 30 to 50 prayers a day, and a very large amount of spam. He has also signed up for an enormous number of mailing lists and newsletters. Busy fellow.

Stranger from the Depths, by Gerry Turner, 1967. Abridged version 1970.

This was my favorite book for much of my childhood (until about 8th grade). I read the Scholastic abridged version a kajillion times. At least a couple dozen. One of the only science fiction books of my youth whose cover & blurb truthfully advertised what lay inside.

Here’s the blurb on the back:

“Look!” says Gary, as they climb down the cliff. “In that dark opening over there … something gleaming.”

“It’s a tiny statue!” exclaims his brother. “It looks like a lizard man… and I think it’s made of diamond!”

Where has the statue come from? Who made it? The answers lead Gary and his brother into terrifying adventures in a world of fantastic people — miles beneath the ocean floor!

This book, which has a utopian underwater city, and a Jules Verne-like trip to a Dystopian city at the center of the earth, and here’s the best part: two boys who drive around in a jeep, go scuba diving, and don’t have any parents, would make a great movie for kids, or maybe the basis of a cartoon series.

I lost my copy long ago, but recently acquired this one using the Interwebs. This particular version has a pretty good flipbook animation added to the outer margins credited to “Harris Productions”.

* * *

On a related note, I would dearly love to do a coverpop of favorite out-of-print childhood books, but I would need a good collection of covers to make this. If you know of any good resources, leave a comment.

Welcome, visitors from digg.

Here are some recent music-related posts from KrazyDad:

• About the Whitney Music Box
• A φ fractal
• Organum Mathematicum
• Text to Song

More fun stuff in the links on the upper right…

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Welcome also, visitors from flabber.nl. My favorite comment on your site was this one, which needs no translation:

“sjiiiiiiit wat een troep man!”

Of course, this was followed by another comment:

“leem”

Good thing I can’t read dutch!

The QFold puzzle website contains puzzles that are meant to be printed and solved with a pencil.

The puzzles are beautiful symmetrical designs that contain 20 hidden asymmetrical elements. To solve the puzzle, you identify these 20 elements of the puzzle and count the number of instances of each class of asymmetry (this is explained in a sample puzzle). This information is then used to identify a secret word or phrase.

The puzzles are free.

Today I emailed this photo to Flickr. I had taken it with my cellphone last month while traveling on business. Within minutes, Jogales added a comment which revealed the make of the plane, the airline, and pointed me to a far more interesting picture of this very same plane colliding with another plane, on the ground, its wing slicing through the tail.

And that is why Flickr is cool.

It is not so much the technologies that were involved in making this happen (cellphones, digital cameras, email, tags, search, etc…). I could have found the same information myself, without uploading the photo to Flickr, if I had bothered to look for it. But I didn’t even think to look for it — and that is where Flickr comes in:

It nudges you.

And the humans that use Flickr, Jogales in this case, are the engine behind that bit of magic.

UPDATE: Chris Barrus posts about a similar experience.

Here’s a new coverpop featuring the works of my favorite sf author of his generation, Philip K. Dick. The covers were provided by the Philip K. Dick cover gallery, courtesy of Jason Koornick.

Ed Pegg Jr, of the excellent MathPuzzle.com, has put up a complete set of scans of a profusely illustrated classic from 1914 containing 5000 unique puzzles.

Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles.

If the name Sam Loyd isn’t familiar to you, perhaps it should be. Loyd was the inventor of the sliding 15-tile puzzle. Here’s my own Flickr-powered version of the 15 puzzle.

Warning: Some of the illustrations and text is politically incorrect by today’s standards. Consider this informative gem: “The chinese are wonderfully expert at figures, although in some way or other they seem to do everything backwards…”

Oh yes, some of the puzzles in the book have been selected as ‘prize puzzles.’ “A prize of one hundred ($100) dollars will be awarded to the person who sends in the best set of correct answers to these ‘Prize Puzzles’ before the first of January, 1915.”

Better get cracking!

Link courtesy of Anarchaia.