bouncingboomergirlgeek: fyi & fwiw

Tip o' The Week: Turn Your Data Into 'Info-Art'

Look at the graphic below and see what it seems to suggest before I tell you.

It's a screenshot from a chart that shows the most popular names for girl babies in Austria last year. But the point of my sharing it is not about Austria, or even baby names (and certainly not that my nom de plume is on it). I share it as a great little sample of 21st century "Info Art" in which words and numbers become something much more than the sum of their parts.

If you are familiar with "tag clouds" on blogs like mine, then you know without being told that the larger words have the most weight (in this case, popular with Austrian mothers of new baby girls). What you wouldn't know unless I filled in the blanks. is that it was made by uploading a spreadsheet of data to a free public site run by the Watson Reseach Center at IBM, where an online algorithim rendered it into this information graphic (yes, you can pick your own colors). The site, Many Eyes, is another great example of the Win-Win Web in which all participants benefit. They say their goal in offering it for free is to "democratize visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis." Not to mention it's a nice public service from IBM. Word clouds are only one of the ways that Many Eyes can take your alpha-numeric data and turn it into a nifty info graphic. Use the following links to jump into ther visualizations yourself, take a tour, or read the rest of their "About" page.

The Art of Bootstrapping

The Art of Bootstrapping is a list of practical business tips for tough times by Apple Evangelist Guy Kawaski published on the AmEx Open Forum. Click here to read. Also on the same web site by the same author,  The No-Bull-Shiitake Investor Wishlist. and the unfortunate but sometimes necessary “The Art of Laying People Off.” As Guy himself said while posting that last link, "Actually, I hope you don’t have to read it."

Create Without Limits - Sell Without Fees

The title above is the slogan for a nifty-sounding site just getting launched. Artfire.com is for artisans selling their self-designed self-made wares online (click image for a sample view). The art can be whatever you wish, from a piece of jewelry all handmade to a custom digital template for a new business card. A basic storefront is free, and artists sell without added fees. The biz model appears to make its money off the larger shops, but even the full boat package is cheap ($7 monthly) a price they will guarantee for life to the next 5,000 accounts. The site seeks to build community too. It encourages members to interact, even to blog, and it has a go green section. With this level of energy and ease of access, they might become serious rivals for the niche-leader Etsy.com.

New & Neat This Week: Befunky

Another nifty "cloud app" I had lots of fun with recently is the "Cartoonizer" from Befunky.com.

You upload a picture (via a desktop file, a webcam snip or or an online link), apply the online tools (including sliders for sharpness and color), and voila, the photo is now a black and white sketch or a color cartoon or a cute little avatar.  Tweak it until you like it, then save to disk. Lots o' fun for gamers and bloggers. Only glitch: it did not play so well with my old version of IE, but worked like a charm in Firefox. (I used it for the NinaB pic here on my profile page,  while the sample at left is a screenshot of the toon-pic of Mehmet O., the Creative DIrector of Befunky.)

Thanks for this tip to Amit at the digital inspiration blog